Among the singularly interesting Old Red fossils of Mr. Duff's collection I saw the impression of a large ichthyolite from the superior yellow sandstone of the Upper Old Red, which had been brought him by a country diker only a few days before. In breaking open a building stone, the diker had found the inside of it, he said, covered over with curiously carved flowers; and, knowing that Mr. Duff had a turn for curiosities, he had brought the flowers to him. The supposed flowers are the sculpturings on the scales of the ichthyolite; and, true to the analogy of the diker, on at least a first glance, they may be held to resemble the rather equivocal florets of a cheap wall-paper, or of an ornamental tile. The specimen exhibits the impressions of four rows of oblong rectangular scales. One row contains seven of these, and another eight. Each scale averages about an inch and a quarter in length, by about three quarters of an inch in breadth; and the parallelogramical field which it presents is occupied by a curious piece of carving. By a sort of pictorial illusion, the device appears as if in motion: it would seem as if a sudden explosion had taken place in the middle of the field, and as if the numerous dislodged fragments, propelled all around by the central force, were hurrying to the sides. But these seeming fragments were not elevations in the original scale, but depressions. They almost seem as if they had been indented into it, in the way one sees the first heavy drops of a thunder shower indented into a platform of damp sea sand; and this last peculiarity of appearance seems to have suggested the name which this sole representative of an extinct genus has received during the course of the last few weeks from Agassiz. An Elgin gentleman forwarded to Neufchatel a singularly fine calotype of the fossil, taken by Mr. Adamson of Edinburgh, with a full-size drawing of a few of the scales; and from the calotype and the drawing the naturalist has decided that the genus is entirely new, and that henceforth it shall bear the descriptive name of Stagonolepis, or drop-scale. As I looked for the first time on this broken fragment of an ichthyolite,--the sole representative and record of an entire genus of creatures that had been once called into existence to fulfil some wise purpose of the Creator long since accomplished,--I bethought me of Rogers's noble lines on the Torso,-- "And dost thou still, thou mass of breathing stone, (Thy giant limbs to night and chaos hurled) Still sit as on the fragment of a world, Surviving all?"