Fishes. The inaccessible recesses of the waters they inhabit, renders the study of their nature and habits much more difficult than that of terrestrial animals. The arrangement of this large and important class of Vertebrata was the last great work undertaken by Cuvier, not long before his lamented death, and nearly eight thousand species of living Fishes had come under his observation. The full development of their history and numbers, and of the functions they discharge in the economy of nature, he has left to his able successors.
The fact of the formation of so large a portion of the
surface of the earth beneath the water, would lead us to expect
traces of the former existence of Fishes, wherever we
have the remains of aquatic Mollusca, Articulata, and
Radiata. Although a few remarkable places have long
been celebrated as the repositories of fossil Fishes, even, of
these there are some, whose geological relations have
scarcely yet been ascertained, while the nature of their
Fishes remains in still greater obscurity.[1]
cast in the British Museum, taken from another slabs found in the same quarries, and impressed with footsteps of some small aquatic reptile.
Some fragments of bones were found in the same quarries with these footsteps, but were destroyed.
A thin deposite of Green Marl, which lay upon the inferior bed of sand, at the time when the footsteps were impressed, causes the slabs above and below it to part readily, and exhibit the casts that were formed by the upper sand, in the prints that the animals had made on the lower stratum, through the marl, while soft, and sufficiently tenacious to retain the form of the footsteps.
- ↑ The most celebrated deposites of fossil Fishes in Europe are the coal formation of Saarbruck, in Lorraine; the bituminous slate of Mansfeld, in Thuringia; the calcareous lithographic slate of Solenhofen; the compact blue slate of Glaris; the limestone of Monte Bolca, near Verona; the marlstone of Oeningen, in Switzerland; and of Aix, in Provence.
Every attempt that has yet been made at a systematic arrangement of these Fishes has been more or less defective, from an endeavour to arrange them under existing genera and families. The imperfection of his own, and of all preceding classifications of Fishes, is admitted by
