,
though supplemented shortly after by that of Dr. Buckland in his
Bridgewater Treatise, carried me but a little way. I saw that two of the
Old Red genera--_Osteolepis_ and _Diplopterus_--resembled the American
fish externally. It will be seen that the first-mentioned of these
ancient ichthyolites bears a name compounded, though, in the reverse
order, of exactly the same words. But while I found the skeleton of the
Lepidosteus described as remarkably hard and solid, I could detect in
the _Osteolepis_ and its kindred genus no trace of internal skeleton at
all The Cephalaspean genera, too--_Coccosteus_ and
_Pterichthys_--greatly puzzled me: I could find no living analogues for
them; and so, in my often-repeated attempts at restoration, I had to
build them up plate by plate, as a child sets up its dissected map or
picture bit by bit--every new specimen that turned up furnishing a key
for some part previously unknown--until at length, after many an
abortive effort, the creatures rose up before me in their strange,
unwonted proportions, as they had lived, untold ages before, in the
primaeval seas. The extraordinary form of _Pterichthys_ filled me with
astonishment; and with its arched carpace and flat plastron restored
before me, I leaped to the conclusion, that as the recent Lepidosteus,
with its ancient representatives of the Old Red Sandstone, were sauroid
fishes--strange connecting links between fishes and alligators--so the
_Pterichthys_ was a Chelonian fish--a connecting link between the fish
and the tortoise. A gurnard--insinuated so far through the shell of a
small tortoise as to suffer its head to protrude from the anterior
opening, furnished with oar-like paddles instead of pectoral fins, and
with its caudal fin clipped to a point--would, I found, form no
inadequate representative of this strangest of fishes. And when, some
years after, I had the pleasure of introducing it to the notice of
Agassiz, I found that, with all his world-wide experience of its class,
it was as much an object of wonder to him as it had been to myself. "It
is impossible," we find him saying, in his great work, "to see aught
more bizarre in all creation than the _Pterichthyan_ genus: the same
astonishment that Cuvier felt in examining the Plesiosaurus, I myself
experienced, when Mr. H. Miller, the first discoverer of these fossils,
showed me the specimens which he had detected in the Old Red Sandstone
of Cromarty." And there were peculiaritie