44 FOOTMARKS OF CHIROTHERIUM 



now acknowledged by every one to be the skeleton of a sala- 

 mander, and that Spallanzani described as the relics of ante- 

 diluvian giants, what were afterwards found to be bones of 

 extinct elephants. An imperfect relic from the new red sand- 

 stone of Burdiehouse, lately pronounced by an English ana- 

 tomist to be the tusk of a wolf, has been subsequently ascer- 

 tained to be the tooth of a sauroid fish, common in that for- 

 mation. Although no remnant of our race was ever found 

 but in alluvial deposits, impressions of this kind found in the 

 sandstones of America have been confidently referred to the 

 human species : and impressions identical in every respect 

 with those now before you, and which were found in the new 

 red sandstone of Germany, have been pronounced, by a dis- 

 tinguished naturalist of that country, to belong to an animal 

 of the class Mammalia, and of the order Marsupialla. The 

 free condition of the supposed thumb both on the large hind 

 feet and on the small anterior extremities in the specimen 

 before you, as in those of Germany, might as well entitle this 

 animal to a place among the Quadrumana, next to man, but 

 the geologists are more attached to the heterogeneous order 

 of marsupial quadrupeds, from a belief that certain bones 

 found in the oolites of Stonesfield, have been determined to 

 belong to Mammalia of this order. Impressions of the feet 

 of tortoises were observed several years since in quarries of 

 this new red sandstone in Dumfriesshire, and in other locali- 

 ties, and they abound in this sandstone from the Stourton 

 quarry, along with numerous impressions of the webbed feet 

 of Emydes, of jointed reeds, and of the slender feet and claws 

 of lacertine reptiles. But, as might be expected, these foot- 

 marks of tortoises were at first referred to Mammalia, to dogs 

 or similar quadrupeds walking up an inclined plane of yield- 

 ing sand, which had subsequently consolidated, to form the 

 dense rocks of the quarry. 



The rock at Stourton from which these specimens have been 

 obtained, is extremely soft, loose, and everywhere percolated 

 by water, so that but little of it is capable of being used as a 

 building material. It dips about fifteen degrees to the east, 

 like the present acclivity of Stourton hill, and it appears to 

 have done so when the foot-marks were impressed and the 

 reeds grew on its surface. It forms the surface rock of all 

 this part of England on the shores of the Mersey, and appears 

 to have been very little disturbed in its primitive horizontal 

 position by voltaic agency, so that its rapidly decomposing 

 surface forms the loose sandy soil around this city, and we 

 have to wade for a mile through deep sand, in ascending 

 Stourton hill to the quarry. But the same new red sandstone 



