The ability displayed by Cuvier in restoring, from a few broken fragments of bone, the skeleton of the entire animal to which the fragments had belonged, astonished the world He had learned to interpret signs as incomprehensible to every one else as the mysterious handwriting on the wall had been to the courtiers of Belshazzar. The condyle of a jaw became in his hands a key to the character of the original possessor; and in a few mouldering vertebræ, or in the dilapidated bones of a fore-arm or a foot, he could read a curious history of habits and instincts. In common with several gentlemen of Edinburgh, all men known to science, I was as much struck with the skill displayed by Agassiz in piecing together the fragments of the huge crustacean of Balruddery, and in demonstrating its nature as such. The numerous specimens of Mr. Webster were opened out before us. On a previous morning I had examined them, as I have said, in the company of Mr. Murchison and Dr. Buckland; they had been seen also by Lord Greenock, Dr. Traill, and Mr. Charles M'Laren; and their fragments of new and undescribed fishes had been at once recognized with reference to at least their class. But the collection contained organisms of a different kind, which seemed inexplicable to all--forms of various design, but so regularly mathematical in their outlines that they might be all described by a ruler and a pair of compasses, and yet the whole were covered by seeming scales. There were the fragments of scaly rhombs, of scaly crescents, of scaly circles, with scaly parallelograms attached to them, and of several other regular compound figures besides. Mr. Murchison, familiar with the older fossils, remarked the close resemblance of the seeming scales to those of the _Seraphim_ of Forfarshire, but deferred the whole to the judgment of Agassiz; no one else hazarded a conjecture. Agassiz glanced over the collection. One specimen especially caught his attention--an elegantly symmetrical one. It seemed a combination of the parallelogram and the crescent: there were pointed horns at each end; but the convex and concave lines of the opposite sides passed into almost parallel right lines towards the centre. His eye brightened as he contemplated it. "I will tell you," he said, turning to the company--"I will tell you what these are--the remains of a huge lobster." He arranged the specimens in the group before him with as much apparent ease as I have seen a young girl arranging the pieces of ivory or mother-of-pearl in an Indian puzzle. A few broken pieces completed the lozenge-shaped shield; two detached specimens, placed on its opposite sides, furnished the claws; two or three semi-rings, with serrated edges, composed the jointed body; the compound figure, which but a minute before had so strongly attracted his attention, furnished the terminal flap; and there lay the huge lobster before us, palpable to all. There is homage due to supereminent genius,