oft skinny snouts and membranous fins; but to
cover the hands with flexible steel gauntlets, and the face with such an
iron mask as that worn by the mysterious prisoner of Louis XIV., would
require a very large amount of ingenuity indeed; and the ancient
ichthyolites of the Old Red were all masked and gauntleted. Now the
detached plates and scales of the stratified clay exhibit not a few of
the mechanical contrivances through which the bony coverings of these
fish were made to unite--as in coats of old armor--great strength with
great flexibility. The scales of the Osteolepis and Diplopterus I found
nicely bevelled atop and at one of the sides; so that where they
overlapped each other,--for at the joints not a needle-point could be
insinuated,--the thickness of the two scales equalled but the thickness
of one scale in the centre, and thus an equable covering was formed. I
brought with me some of these detached scales, and they now lie fitted
together on the table before me, like pieces of complicated hewn work
carefully arranged on the ground ere the workman transfers them to their
place on the wall. In the smaller-scaled fish, such as the
Cheiracanthus and Cheirolepis, a different principle obtained. The
minute glittering rhombs of bone were set thick on the skin, like those
small scales of metal sewed on leather, that formed an inferior kind of
armor still in use in eastern nations, and which was partially used in
our own country just ere the buff coat altogether superseded the coat of
mail. I found a beautiful piece of jaw in the clay, with the enamelled
tusks bristling on its brightly enamelled edge, like iron teeth in an
iron rake. Mr. Parkinson expresses some wonder, in his work on fossils,
that in a fine ichthyolite in the British Museum, not only the teeth
should have been preserved, but also the lips; but we now know enough of
the construction of the more ancient fish, to cease wondering. The lips
were formed of as solid bone as the teeth themselves, and had as fair a
chance of being preserved entire; just as the metallic rim of a toothed
wheel has as fair a chance of being preserved as the metallic teeth that
project from it. I was interested in marking the various modes of
attachment to the body of the animal which the detached scales exhibit.
The slater fastens on his slates with nails driven into the wood: the
tiler secures his tiles by means of a raised bar on the under side of
each, that locks into a corres