3. Above is the Pterichthys,[51] or winged fish. We have here a fish more strikingly different to any existing species than either of the other two just passed under review. “Imagine,” says Miller, “the figure of a man rudely drawn in black on a grey ground; the head cut off by the shoulders; the arms spread at full, as in the attitude of swimming; the body rather long than otherwise, and narrowing from the chest downwards; one of the legs cut away at the hip-joint; the other, as if to preserve the balance, placed directly in the centre of the figure, which it seems to support. Such, at the first glance, is the appearance of the fossil.”[52] We will now turn to the fourth and last of the singular fishes of this formation. [Illustration: Fossil] 4. The Osteolepis,[53] or bony scaled fish. Here we have in the old red sandstone the first perfect specimen of a fish with pectoral, abdominal, and caudal fins, ending as the others do in the heterocercal tail. The vertebral column seems to have run on to well-nigh the extremity of the caudal fin, which we find developed chiefly on the under side. The tail was a one-sided tail. Take into account with these peculiarities such as the naked skull, jaws, and operculum,[54] the naked and thickly set rays, and the unequally lobed condition of tail, a body covered with scales that glitter like sheets of mica, and assume, according to their position, the parallelogramical, rhomboidal, angular, or polygonal form, a lateral line raised, not depressed, a raised bar on the inner or bony side of the scales, which, like the doubled up end of a tile, seems to have served the purpose of fastening them in their places, a general clustering of alternate fins towards the tail—and the _tout ensemble_ must surely impart to the reader the idea of a very singular little fish.[55]