Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 60.djvu/564

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HEN a fish dies he leaves no friends. His body is at once attacked by hundreds of creatures ranging from the one-celled protozoa and bacteria to individuals of his own species. His flesh is devoured, his bones are scattered, the gelatinous substance in them decays, and the phosphate of lime is in time dissolved in the water. For this reason few fishes of the millions who die each year leave any trace for future preservation. At the most, a few teeth, a fin spine or a bone buried in the clay might remain intact or in such condition as to be recognized.

But now and then it happens that a dead fish may fall in more fortunate conditions. On a sea bottom of fine clay the bones, or even the whole body, might be buried in such a way as to be sealed up and protected from total decomposition. The flesh would in any case disappear and leave no mark or at the most a mere cast of its surface. But the hard parts might persist, and now and then they do persist, the lime unchanged or else silicified or subjected to some other form of chemical substitution. Only the scales, the teeth, the bones, the spines and the fin rays can be preserved in the rocks of sea or lake bottom. In a few localities, as Green River in Wyoming, Monte Bolca in Tuscany and Mount Lebanon in Syria, with certain quarries in Scotland and lithographic stones in Germany, many skeletons of fishes have been found, pressed flat in layers of very fine rock, their structures traced as delicately as if actually drawn on the smooth stone. Fragments preserved in ruder fashion abound in the clays and even the sandstones of the earliest geologic ages. In most cases, however, fossil fishes are known from detached and scattered fragments, many of them, especially of the sharks, by the teeth alone. Fishes have occurred in all ages from the Silurian to the present time and no doubt the very first lived long before the Silurian.

No one can say what the earliest fishes were like, nor do we know what was their real relation to the worm-like forms among which men have sought their presumable ancestors, nor to the Tunicates and other chordate forms, not fish-like, but still degenerate relatives of the primeval fish.

From analogy we may suppose that the first fishes which ever were bore some resemblance to the lancelet, for that is a fish-like creature with every structure reduced to the lowest terms. But as the lancelet