plete in all its parts. First he erected the fishes that to an internal cartilaginous skeleton unite an external armature of plates and points of bone, into his Placoid order; next, gathering together a mere handful of individuals from among the various orders and families over which they had been scattered, the sturgeons from among the cartilaginous fishes, and the lepidosteus and polypterus from among the Clupia or herrings,-he erected into a small ganoid order all the fishes that are covered, whatever the consistency of their skeleton, by a continuous or nearly continuous armour of enamelled bone, or by great bony plates that lock into each other at their edges. Out of the remaining fishes,-those covered with scales of a horny substance, and which now comprise * Geologic [Pla. Gan. Cte. Cyc.] arrangement. THE GENEALOGY OF FISHES. Here, as in the former diagrams (figs. 1 and 4), the horizontal lines represent the divisions of the great geologic systems; nearly nine-tenths of the whole class,-he erected two orders more, a Ctenoid order, consisting of fishes whose scales, like those of the perch, are pectinated at their lower edges like the teeth of a comb, and a Cycloid order, composed of fishes whose scales, like those of the salmon, are defined all around by a simple continuous margin; and no sooner was the division effected than it was found to cast a singularly clear light on the early history of the class. The earliest fishesfirst-born of their family-seem to have been all placoids. The Silurian System has not yet afforded trace of any other vertebral animal. With the Old Red Sandstone the ganoids were ushered upon the scene in amazing abundance; and for untold ages, comprising mayhap millions of years, the entire ichthyic class consisted, so far as is yet known, of but these two orders. AMBLYPTERUS MACROPTERUS. From the Coal at Saarbruck. (A Ganoid of the Carboniferous System.) During the times of the Old Red Sandstone, of the Carboniferous, of the Permian, of the Triassic, and of the while the vertical lines indicate the sweep of the several orders of fishes across the scale, and the periods, so far as has yet been determined, of their first occurrence in creation. E Oolitic Systems, all fishes, though apparently as numerous individually as they are now, were comprised in the ganoidal and placoidal orders. The period of these orders seems to have been nearly correspondent with the reign, in the vegetable kingdom, of the Acrogens and Gymnogens, with the intermediate classes, their allies. At length, during the ages of the Chalk, the Cycloids and Ctenoids were ushered in, and were Fig. 55. gradually developed in creation until the human period, in which they seem to have reached their culminating point, and now many times exceed in number and importance all other fishes. We do not see a sturgeon (our British representative of the ganoids) once in a twelvemonth; and though the skate and dog-fish (our representatives of the placoids) are greatly less rare, their number bears but a small proportion to that of the fishes belonging to the two pre PLATAX ALTISSIMUS. A Ctenoid of Monte-Bolca. (Eocene.) vailing orders, of which thousands of boat-loads are landed on our coasts every day. The all but entire disappearance of the ganoids from creation is surely a curious and not unsuggestive circumstance. In the human family there are races that have long since reached their culminating point, and are now either fast disappearing or have already disappeared. The Aztecs of Central America, or the Copts of the valley of the Nile, are but the inconsiderable fragments of once mighty nations, memorials of whose greatness live in the vast sepulchral mounds of the far West, or in the temples of Thebes or Luxor, or the pyramids of Gizah. But in the rivers of these very countries,in the Polypterus of the Nile, or the Lepidosteus of the Mississippi, we are presented with the few surviving fragments of a dynasty compared with which that of Egypt or of Central America occupied but an exceedingly small portion of either space or time. The dynasty of the ganoids was at one time co-extensive with every river, lake, and sea, and endured during the unreckoned cons which extended from the times of the Lower Old Red Sandstone until those of the Chalk, I may here mention, that as there are orders of plants, such as the Rosacea and the Grasses, that scarce preceded man in their appearance, so there are families of fishes that seem peculiarly to belong to the human period. Of these, there is a family very familiar on our coasts, and which, though it furnishes none of our higher ichthyic luxuries, is remarkable for the numbers of the human family which it provides with a wholesome and palatable food. The delicate Salmonidæ and the Pleuronectidæ, -families to which the salmon and turbot belong,-were ushered into being as early as the times of the Chalk ; but the Gadidae or cod family,—that family to which the cod proper, the haddock, the dorse, the whiting, the coal-fish, the pollock, the hake, the torsk, and the ling belong, with many other useful and wholesome |