FOOTPRINTS ON THE SANDS OF TIME 47 



antiquity, and of the frail tenure of human works ! On that 

 morning, how long ago no one can tell, or ever will know, gentle 

 showers watered the earth, an ocean was unruffled, and upon its 

 borders primaeval beings enjoyed their existence and inscribed 

 their eventful history." 



And now to sum up the results of their work. Most of the 

 tracks so fully described and figured by these two authors were 

 probably made by amphibians and reptiles, and it is doubtful 

 if any of them were made, as they supposed, by birds. They 

 vary extremely, both in size and character. While some are 

 only half an inch long ; others, like the huge Otozoum, of Hitchcock 

 (see Fig. 5, left-hand corner), are twenty inches long, and show 

 a stride of three feet! Some of the creatures that made the 

 tracks had five toes, some four, and many of them only three. 

 Again, some had hind feet and fore feet of nearly equal size, 

 and evidently walked or crawled on all-fours. 



We have here reproduced, from Professor Hitchcock's work, 

 a highly interesting plate (Plate I.), which shows that some of 

 the animals had large hind feet and small fore feet, and that 

 they sometimes put down the latter, as kangaroos do, for there 

 are the impressions of them. However, such impressions are 

 rare, and, as a rule, the creatures, many of which were probably 

 Dinosaurs, walked on their hind limbs, thus producing those 

 three-toed bird-like impressions which are shown on the slabs 

 represented in our figures. It is hardly likely that they hopped 

 on their hind legs as kangaroos do; they were probably too 

 heavy for that ; but they may have made something like a hop 

 in bringing up their hind feet, as we have seen the kangaroos 

 do in the Zoological Gardens. Another very interesting point 

 brought to light by the researches of Hitchcock and Deane is, 



