. The museum of natural history, with introductory essay on the natural history of the primeval world : being a popular account of the structure, habits, and classification of the various departments of the animal kingdom, quadrupeds, birds, reptiles, fishes, shells, and insects, including the insects destructive to agriculture . r Winged Fish, whose fossil remains were first discovered by Ilugh Miller. His description of this apparently monstrous anomaly, which nevertheless was admirably fitted to discharge its peculiar functions in the economy of creation, will interest the reader. Imagine,
. The museum of natural history, with introductory essay on the natural history of the primeval world : being a popular account of the structure, habits, and classification of the various departments of the animal kingdom, quadrupeds, birds, reptiles, fishes, shells, and insects, including the insects destructive to agriculture . r Winged Fish, whose fossil remains were first discovered by Ilugh Miller. His description of this apparently monstrous anomaly, which nevertheless was admirably fitted to discharge its peculiar functions in the economy of creation, will interest the reader. Imagine, he says, the figure of a man roughly drawn in black on a grey ground, the head amputated at the shoulders, the arms extended as in the attitude of swimming, the body rather long than otherwise, and narrowing from the chest down- NATURAL HISTORY OF THE PRIMEVAL WORLD. wards ; one of tlie legs cut away at tlie Iiip-joiiit, andthe other, as if to preserve the balance, placed directlyunder the centre of the figure which it seems to sup-port. Such, at a first glauce, is the appearance of thefossil iu its sandstone bed. The body was of very considerable depth, perhapslittle less deep proportionally from back to breast thanthe body of the tortoise; the under part was flat, theupper rose towards the centre into a roof-like lies of the Dovonian epoch. 1, Coccnstens,one-third natural size; 2, natural size; 3, Cephalaspis, one-fouith natiiial size. and both under and upper were encased in a strongarmour of bony plates, which, resembling those of thetortoise more closely than those of the crustacean,received their accessions of growth at the sutures oredges. On the underside the plates are divided by two linesof suture, which i-un, the one longitudinally throughthe centre of the body, the other transversely, alsothrovigh the centre of it: they bisect one another atright angles, but a lozenge-shaped plate intervenes atthe point of bisection. There are thus fi
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