132 Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria. 



thin clayey layer, as if the people who made them had had 

 muddy feet. The material that filled the cavities is said to have 

 come away on the under surface of the overlying slab. 



This slab is not convincing. The flat, smooth depressions look 

 not unlike those that would be formed by a naked person sitting 

 on the sand ; but if so, the proportions between the width of his 

 buttocks and the width of his feet (3 inches) were abnormal. It 

 is therefore held that the impressions were made by two persons 

 sitting side by side ; and Mr. McDowell tells me that a slight 

 ridge once marked the division between the buttocks on the 

 larger impression, but it has since crumbled away. If the two 

 depressions are to be regarded as having been made by two naked 

 people sitting on the sand, the slab does not seem to me to look 

 like it. The interval between the impressions is only ^ of an 

 inch, which is too little. It is accordingly explained that the 

 man got up first, and that the woman moved slightly to her 

 left as she rose, and thus caused the narrowness of the ridge. 

 One would have expected that the regularity of the curve of the 

 impression left by the man would have been marred by the same 

 movement. 



The supposed buttock impressions may be such, l)ut they may 

 be merely hollows formed by wind eddies. How the supposed 

 footprints were formed I have no definite opinion. They look 

 more like the impressions that would V)e left by l>ooted, than by 

 naked, feet ; and Mr. McDowell tells me that such is the general 

 opinion of those who have examined the specimens. It has in- 

 deed been suggested that they were made by some early explorer 

 who landed on this coast. The width of tlie footprint seems 

 to me too uniform to have been made by a naked foot ; the 

 cavity is deepest at the toe end where the foot should have 

 made a much wider impression than at the heel. The greater 

 depth of the front of the footprint seems to me improbable in the 

 case of footprints made by people descending the steep slope of a 

 loose dune. I have had some practice in following the footprints 

 of East African negroes, and these marks do not appeal to me. 

 They seem to me unlike naked footprints, but to resemble a care- 

 less man's idea of what human footprints would be like. 



If this slab be evidence that aboriginal man lived in Warrnam- 

 bool at the time that the lower beds of the Warrnambool sand- 



