430 SPECIAL GEOLOGY. 



Some time since, similar impressions were observed in 

 strata of the same date, in five superimposed beds of clay 

 at the Storton Quarries, on the Cheshire shore of the 

 Mersey, and which, like the imprints previously discovered 



FIG. 292. Line of footmarks on a slab of sandstone. Hildburghausen, Saxony. 



in Germany, were referred to the presumed marsupial 

 animal Chirotherium. These footmarks exercised for some 

 time the ingenuity of naturalists ; and, among other con- 

 clusions, it was inferred that impressions of such depth 

 and distinctness could only have been made by animals 

 walking on dry land, as their weight would have been 

 insufficient to cause them to sink so deeply in yielding 

 clay under water. It was farther supposed that each layer 

 of clay which bore these imprints had been afterwards 

 submerged, so that a new stratum was successively formed 

 above the former. Professor Owen having directed his 

 attention to these footmarks, and to the remains of reptiles, 

 consisting of bones and teeth, which had been observed 

 in beds of this age in Germany and England, arrived 

 at the conclusion that the impressions were made by 

 an animal of a different class. The fossil teeth exhibited 

 externally the reptile type, but internally they presented 

 a most complicated texture, differing from that of all 

 other reptiles hitherto discovered. A section of one of 

 these teeth, under the microscope, presents a series of 

 irregular folds, resembling the labyrinthic windings of the 

 human brain: from this circumstance the name Labyrin- 

 thodon was proposed for the genus. 



An examination of the various bones, procured from the 

 same formation, enabled him to describe five species of this 

 new genus, which had the posterior extremities much larger 

 than the anterior. Hence the idea was first suggested that 

 the tracks in question were those of the Labyrinthodon. It 

 waa farther observed, that the footprints of Chirotherium 

 were more like those of toads than of any other living 



