[3] Since the above sentence was written and set in type, I have learned that my ingenious friend, Mr. Charles Peach of the Customs, Fowey, so well known for his palæontological discoveries, has just found in the Devonian system of Cornwall, fragments of what seem to be dermal plates of _Asterolepis_. It is a somewhat curious circumstance, that the two farthest removed extremities of Great Britain—Cornwall and Caithness—should be tipped by fossiliferous deposits of the same ancient system, and that organisms which, when they lived, were contemporary, should be found embedded in the rocks which rise over the British Channel on the one extremity, and overhang the Pentland Frith on the other. [4] Figured from a Thurso specimen, slightly different in its proportions from the Stromness specimen described. [5] Dr. George Garson, Stromness, and Mr. William Watt, jun. Skaill. [6] The Continental assertors of the development hypothesis are greatly more frank than those of our own country regarding the “life after death,” and what man has to expect from it. The individual, they tell us, perishes forever; but, then, out of his remains there spring up other vitalities. The immortality of the soul is, it would seem, an idle figment, for there really exists no such things as souls; but is there no comfort in being taught, instead, that we are to resolve into monads and maggots? Job solaced himself with the assurance that, even after worms had destroyed his body, he was in the flesh to see God. Had Professor Oken been one of his comforters, he would have sought to restrict his hopes to the prospect of living in the worms. “If the organic fundamental substance _consist_ of infusoria,” says the Professor, “so must the whole organic world _originate_ from infusoria. Plants and animals can only be metamorphoses of infusoria. This being granted, so also must all organizations _consist_ of infusoria, and, during their destruction, dissolve into the same. Every plant, every animal, is converted by maceration into a mucous mass; this putrefies, and the moisture is stocked with infusoria. Putrefaction is nothing else than a division of organisms into infusoria,—a reduction of the higher to the primary life.... Death is no annihilation, but only a change. One individual emerges out of another. Death is only a transition to another life,—not into death. This transition from one life to another takes place through the primary condition of the organic, or the mucus.”—_Physio-Philosophy_, pp. 187-189.