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In 1882, the noted pisciculturist and fish writer Fred Mather surveyed the “ichthyic fauna” of several Adirondack lakes and found brook trout in most of them.

Before the recent progress of discovery above alluded to had shown the fallacy of such ideas, it was imagined by some geologists that this ichthyic type was the more highly developed, because it took the lead at the head of nature before the class of reptiles had been created.

Instead, half die embryotic gadi are almost immediately devoured by spawn-eaters, hundreds of thousands perish in incubation, hundreds of thousands more succumb to the perils attending ichthyic infancy, leaving but a few score to attain to adult usefulness and pass an honored old age with the fragrance of a well-spent life in the country grocery.

Then came an age of fishes huge of size, and that to the peculiar ichthyic organization added certain well-marked characteristics of the reptilian class immediately above them.

In my new-found deposit—to which I soon added, however, within the limits of the parish, some six or eight deposits more, all charged with the same ichthyic remains—I found I had work enough before me for the patient study of years.