"These fishes seem to have thronged the waters of the period, and their remains are often found in masses, =as if they had been suddenly entombed in living shoals= by the sediment which now contains them." I beg leave to quote somewhat at length the picturesque language of Hugh Miller[60] regarding these rocks as found in Scotland. "The river bull-head, when attacked by an enemy, or immediately as it feels the hook in its jaws, erects its two spines at nearly right angles with the plates of the head, as if to render itself as difficult of being swallowed as possible. The attitude is one of danger and alarm; and it is a curious fact, to which I shall afterward have occasion to advert, that =in this attitude nine-tenths of the= _Pterichthes_ =of the Lower Old Red Sandstone are to be found=.... It presents us, too, with a wonderful record of violent death falling at once, not on a few individuals, but on whole tribes." "At this period of our history, some terrible catastrophe involved in sudden destruction the fish of an area at least a hundred miles from boundary to boundary, perhaps much more. The same platform in Orkney as at Cromarty is strewed thick with remains, which exhibit unequivocally the marks of violent death. The figures are contorted, contracted, curved, the tail in many instances is bent round to the head; the spines stick out; the fins are spread to the full, as in fish that die in convulsions.... The record is one of destruction at once widely spread and total, so far as it extended.... By what quiet but potent agency of destruction were the innumerable existences of =an area perhaps ten thousand square miles in extent annihilated at once=, and yet the medium in which they had lived left undisturbed in its operations? "Conjecture lacks footing in grappling with the enigma, and expatiates in uncertainty over all the known phenomena of death." I shall not taunt the uniformitarians by asking them to direct us to some modern analogies. But I would have the reader remember that these Devonian and other rocks are absolutely world-wide in extent. Surely Howorth is talking good science when he says that his masters Sedgwick and Murchison taught him "that no plainer witness is to be found of any physical fact than that Nature has at times worked with enormous energy and rapidity," and "that the rocky strata teem with evidence of violent and sudden dislocations on a great scale."