I Hope our scientific tourists of the approaching season will take their good eyes into Herefordshire quarries. For now that the Scotch monopoly of the Old Red fishes is broken up, they will be found to repay time and trouble, if searched for in that and the adjoining counties; and something like a reasonable history of these strange old littoral fishes may be the result of a single season's work. There is a great deal about them well worth, knowing, and their remains will be found tolerably abundant, though very fragmentary, both in the sandstones and corn stones; and therefore I have a peculiar pleasure in introducing our primæval fish-fauna to the notice of those on search already—or hoping to be as the season advances—for relics of ancient life.

Before I call particular attention to some fruitful localities, let me say a few words upon the physical condition and geographical aspect of the age they lived in. Though I ought rather to say ages, for they anticipated the advent of the system they are popularly said to belong to—that vast life-era—the extent of whose inland-seas and shallow littoral ocean-zone we see in the sandy, shaly, and gravelly beds which contain our fishes, and of whose deep seas the thick-bedded limestones of Devon are witnesses—called by us Old Red or Devonian; and first appeared upon the stage in true Upper Silurian times; for the Pteraspis Ludensis of the Lower Ludlow shales of Leintwardine (county Salop), is the oldest representative of the family.