. The testimony of the rocks; . igher than the Zos-teracea, — plants whose proper habitat is the sea; but,through an apparently simultaneous advance of the twokingdoms, animal and vegetable, — though of course thesimultaneousness maybe but merely apparent, — the first HISTORY OF ANIMALS. 91 Hnd plants and the first vertebrates appear together in thesame deposit. What, let us mquire, is the character of these ancientfishes, that first comiDlete the scale of animated nature in itsfour master ideas, hy addmg the vertebrate to the inverte-brate divisions ? So far as is yet kno^^ii, they all consis
. The testimony of the rocks; . igher than the Zos-teracea, — plants whose proper habitat is the sea; but,through an apparently simultaneous advance of the twokingdoms, animal and vegetable, — though of course thesimultaneousness maybe but merely apparent, — the first HISTORY OF ANIMALS. 91 Hnd plants and the first vertebrates appear together in thesame deposit. What, let us mquire, is the character of these ancientfishes, that first comiDlete the scale of animated nature in itsfour master ideas, hy addmg the vertebrate to the inverte-brate divisions ? So far as is yet kno^^ii, they all consist ofone well marked order, — that placoidal order of Agassizthat to an internal IrameAvork of cartilage adds an externalarmature, consisting of plates, spmes, and shagreen pointsof solid bone. Eitlicr of the two kmds of dog-fishes on ourcoasts, — the spiked or spotted, — may be accepted as notinadequate representatives of this order as it now Port Jackson shark, however. — a creatme that to the Fig. PORT JACKSO>r SHAKK. (Cestracion Phillip pi.) dorsal spines and shagreen-covered skin of the commondog-fish adds a mouth terminal at the snout, not placedbeneath, as in most other sharks, and a palate covered witha dense pavement of crushing teeth, — better illustrates tlieorder as it first appeared in creation than any of our Britishplacoids. And here let me adduce another and very remarkableinstance of the correspondence which obtains between thesequence in which certain classes of organisms were firstushered into being, and the order of classification adopted, 92 THE PAL^ONTOLOGICAL after many revisions, by the higher naturalists. Cuvier,with not a few of the ichthyologists who preceded him,arranged the fishes into two distinct series, — the Cartila-ginous and Osseous; and these last he mainly divided intothe hard or spiny-finned fishes, and the soft or joint-finnedfishes. He placed the sturgeon in his Cartilaginous series;while in his soft-fi
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