The other volume, "First Impressions of England and its People," contains some personal anecdotes and some geology. But the necessary materials you will chiefly find in the article from the "North British Review" which I also inclose. It is from the pen of Sir David Brewster, with whom for the last ten years I have spent a few very agreeable days every year at Christmas, under the roof of a common friend,--one of the landed proprietors of Fifeshire. Sir David's estimate of the writer is, I fear, greatly too high, but his statement of facts regarding him is correct; and I think you will find it quite full enough for the purposes of a brief memoir. With his article I send you one of my own, written about six years ago for the same periodical, as the subject is one in which, from its connection with your master study,--the natural history of fishes,--you may take more interest than most men. It embodies, from observation, what may be regarded as THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THE FISHERMAN, and describes some curious scenes and appearances which I witnessed many years ago when engaged, during a truant boyhood, in prosecuting the herring fishery as an amateur. Many of my observations of natural phenomena date from this idle, and yet not wholly wasted, period of my life. With the volumes I send also a few casts of my less fragile specimens of Asterolepis. Two of the number, those of the external and internal surfaces of the creature's cranial buckler, are really very curious combinations of plates, and when viewed in a slant light have a decidedly sculpturesque and not ungraceful effect. I have seen on our rustic tombstones worse representations of angels, winged and robed, than that formed by the central plates of the interior surface when the light is made to fall along their higher protuberances, leaving the hollows in the shade. You see how truly your prediction regarding the flatness of the creature's head is substantiated by these casts; it is really not easy to know how, placed on so flat a surface, the eyes could have been very available save for star-gazing; but as nature makes no mistakes in such matters, it is possible that the creature, like the flatfishes, may have lived much at the bottom, and that most of the seeing it had use for may have been seeing in an upward direction. None of my other specimens of bucklers are so entire and in so good a state of keeping as the two from which I have taken the casts, but they are greatly larger. One specimen, nearly complete, exhibits an area about four times as great as the largest of these two, and I have fragments of others which must have belonged to fish still more gigantic. The two other casts are of specimens of gill covers, which in the Asterolepis, as in the sturgeon, consisted each of a single plate. In both the exterior surface of the buckler and of the operculum the tubercles are a good deal enveloped in the stone, which is of a consistency too hard to be