ld, and as if the numerous dislodged fragments, propelled all around
by the central force, were hurrying to the sides. But these seeming
fragments were not elevations in the original scale, but depressions.
They almost seem as if they had been indented into it, in the way one
sees the first heavy drops of a thunder shower indented into a platform
of damp sea sand; and this last peculiarity of appearance seems to have
suggested the name which this sole representative of an extinct genus
has received during the course of the last few weeks from Agassiz. An
Elgin gentleman forwarded to Neufchatel a singularly fine calotype of
the fossil, taken by Mr. Adamson of Edinburgh, with a full-size drawing
of a few of the scales; and from the calotype and the drawing the
naturalist has decided that the genus is entirely new, and that
henceforth it shall bear the descriptive name of Stagonolepis, or
drop-scale. As I looked for the first time on this broken fragment of an
ichthyolite,--the sole representative and record of an entire genus of
creatures that had been once called into existence to fulfil some wise
purpose of the Creator long since accomplished,--I bethought me of
Rogers's noble lines on the Torso,--

"And dost thou still, thou mass of breathing stone,
(Thy giant limbs to night and chaos hurled)
Still sit as on the fragment of a world,
Surviving all?"

Here, however, was a still more wonderful Torso than that of the
dismembered Hercules, which so awakened the enthusiasm of the poet.
Strange peculiarities of being,--singular habits, curious instincts, the
history of a race from the period when the all-producing Word had spoken
the first individuals into being, until, in circumstances unfitted for
their longer existence, or in some great annihilating catastrophe, the
last individuals perished,--were all associated with this piece of
sculptured stone; but, like some ancient inscription of the desert,
written in an unknown character and dead tongue, its dark meanings were
fast locked up, and no inhabitant of earth possessed the key. Does that
key anywhere exist, save in the keeping of Him who knows all and
produced all, and to whom there is neither past nor future? Or is there
a record of creation kept by those higher intelligences,--the first-born
of spiritual natures,--whose existence stretches far into the eternity
that has gone by, and who possess, as their inheritance, the whole of
the eternity to come? We may be a