392 Scientific Intelligence — Geology. 



Newark, in New Jersey, in company with Mr W. C. Redfield of New 

 York, wG observed some very distinct rain-prints on ripple-marked 

 shales. Afterwards, in 1842, I saw similar impressions of recent 

 date, which had been made between high and low water mark, on 

 the red sand and mud bordering the Basin of Mines, in the Bay of 

 Fundy. Since that period I have been enabled to form a collection 

 of specimens of this mud, hardened in the sun, through the kindness of 

 Dr Webster of Kentville, to which I shall presently allude. In 

 1843, Mr Redfield, in a letter to the author which was read to this 

 Society, stated that he had found impressions of rain-drops in another 

 locality of the new red sandstone called Pompton, in New Jersey, 

 twenty-five miles from Now York ;* and in the same year he pub- 

 lished in Silliman's Journal an account of the sandstone strata of 

 that place, and of the Ichthyolites contained in them.*]" In these 

 beds, many of which are frequently ripple-marked, and which ex- 

 hibit the footprints of birds, shrinkage cracks are seen, together 

 with fossil impressions and casts of rain-drops and of hail. % 



Early in the present year I received from Mr Richard Brown 

 some fine specimens of rain marks from the greenish shales of the 

 coal measures of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, to which he has made a 

 passing allusion in his excellent description of the Sydney coal-field, 

 in our Quarterly Journal. A comparison of all these specimens has 

 convinced me that the impressions of triassic and carboniferous date 

 above mentioned, have been correctly referred to the action of rain, 

 and that they are distinguishable from such cavities as are sometimes 

 made by the rising of air-bubbles through mud or sand, with which 

 Mr Desor, in a memoir recently published, has declared many, if not 

 all, the supposed fossil rain marks to have been confounded. — 

 Q,uart. Journ, Geol. Sac, vol. vii.. No. 27, p. 238. 



SCIENTIFIC INTELLIGENCE. 



GEOLOGY. 



1. On the Elevation of the Coast of Sweden. By M. Nilsson. 

 — In a work on the existence of man in Scandinavia previously to 

 the historic age (Forhandl. Skanden. Naturf. 4. mode i Christiania, 

 1844, Chr. 1847, p. 93-109), the author furnishes some interesting 

 data relative to the elevation of the land in that region. A rock 

 named Guduiandz Schare, in the harbour of Fyellbacka (lat. 58° 

 35') has ofi'ered opportunities of careful examination ; and hence it 

 has been established that in 1532 the rock was two feet below the 

 surface, in 1742 two feet, and in 1844 four feet above water. Thus 



* Proceedings Geol. Soc, vol. iv., p. 23. 



t Amer. Journ. of Science, vol. xliv., p. 136. 



I Edinb. New Phil. Journal, in 1850, p. 246. 



