496 Geological Society. 
deer and oxen in the peat itself. Footmarks of deer have been also 
noticed in Mr. Talbot’s excavations for a harbour near Margam bur- 
rows on the east of Neath. 
Near Liverpool Mr. Cunningham has successfully continued his 
researches begun in 1838, respecting the footsteps of Chirotherium 
and other animals in the New Red Sandstone at Storeton Hill, om 
the west side of the Mersey. ‘These footsteps oceur on five con- 
secutive beds of clay in the same quarry, the clay beds are very 
thin, and having received the impressions of the feet, afforded a 
series of moulds in which casts were taken by the sueceeding depo- 
sits of sand, now converted into sandstone. ‘The casts of the feet 
are salient in high relief on the lower surfaces of the beds of sand- 
stone, giving exact models of the feet and toes and claws of these 
mysterious animals, of which scarcely a single bone or tooth has 
yet been found, although we are assured by the evidence before us 
of the certainty of their existence at the time when the New Red 
Sandstone was in process of deposition. 
Further discoveries of the footsteps of Chirotherium and five or 
six smaller reptiles in the New Red Sandstone of Cheshire, War- 
wickshire and Salop, have been brought before us by Sir P. Eger- 
ton, Mr. J. Taylor, jun., Mr. Strickland, and Dr. Ward. 
Mr. Cunningham, in a sequel to his paper on the footmarks at 
Storeton, has described impressions on the same slabs with them, 
derived from drops of rain that fell upon thin laminz of clay inter- 
posed between the beds of sand. The clay impressed with these 
prints of rain drops acted as a mould, which transferred the form of 
every drop to the lower surface of the next bed of sand deposited 
upon it, so that entire surfaces of several strata in the same quarry 
are respectively covered with moulds and casts of drops of rain that 
fell whilst these strata were in process of formation. 
On the surface of one stratum at Storeton, impressed with large 
footmarks of a Chirotherium, the depth of the holes formed by the 
rain drops on different parts of the same footstep has varied with the 
unequal amount of pressure on the clay and sand, by the salient 
cushions and retiring hollows of the creature’s foot; and from the 
constancy of this phenomenon upon an entire series of footmarks 
in a long continuous track, we know that this rain fell after the 
animal had passed. The equable size of the casts of large drops 
that cover the entire surface of the slab, except in the parts im- 
pressed by the cushions of the feet, record the falling of a shower of 
heavy drops on the day in which this huge animal had marehed 
along the ancient strand; hemispherical impressions of small drops, 
upon another stratum, show it to have been exposed to only a 
sprinkling of gentle rain that fell at a moment of calm. 
In one small slab of New Red Sandstone found. by Dr.Ward near 
Shrewsbury, we have a combination of proofs as to meteoric, hydro- 
static, and locomotive phenomena, which occurred at a time ineal- 
culably remote, in the atmosphere, the water, and the movements of 
animals, and from which we infer with the certainty of cumulative cir- 
cumstantial evidence, the direction of the wind, the depth and course 
