Note I — Chapter III

The aborigines of South. America deemed it wonderful that the Europeans who first visited them should, without previous concert, agree in reading after the same manner the same scrap of manuscript, and in deriving the same piece of information from it. The writer experienced on this occasion a somewhat similar feeling. His specimens seemed written in a character cramp enough to suggest those doubts regarding original meaning which lead to various readings; but the geologist and the naturalist agreed in perusing them after exactly the same fashion—the one in London, the other in Neufchatel. Such instances give confidence in the findings of science. The decision of Mr. Murchison I subjoin in his own words—his numbers refer to various specimens of Pterichthys: "As to your fossils 1, 2, 3, we know nothing of them here, (London,) except that they remind me of the occipital fragments of some of the Caithness fishes. I do not conceive they can be referrible to any reptile; for, if not fishes, they more closely approach to crustaceans than to any other class. I conceive, however, that Agassiz will pronounce them to be fishes, which, together with the curious genus Cephalaspis of the Old Red Sandstone, form the connecting links between crustaceans and fishes. Your specimens remind one in several respects of the Cephalaspis."