82 VESTIGES OF THE 



than one place in England, they further bear impressions 

 of rain drops which have fallen upon them — the rain, of 

 course, of the inconceivably remote age in which the 

 sandstones were formed. In the Greensill sandstone, 

 near Shrewsbury, it has even been possible to tell from 

 what direction the shower came which impressed the 

 sandy surface, the rims of the marks being somewhat 

 raised on one side, exactly as might be expected from a 

 slanting shower falling at this day upon one of our 

 beaches. These facts have the same sort of interest as 

 the season rings of the Craigleith conifers, as speaking 

 of a parity between soixie of the familiar processes of 

 Nature in those early ages and our own. 



In the new red sandstone, impressions still more 

 important in the inferences to which they tend, have 

 been observed — namely, the footmarks of various 

 animals. In a quarry of this formation, at Corncockle 

 Muir, in Dumfriesshire, where the slabs incline at an 

 angle of thn-ty-eight degrees, the vestiges of an animal 

 supposed to have been a tortoise are distinctly traced 

 up and down the slope, as if the creature had had occa- 

 sion to pass backwards and forwards in that direction 

 only, possibly in its daily visits to the sea. Some slabs 

 similarly impressed, in the Stourton quarries in Clieshire, 

 are farther marked with a shower of rain which we 

 know must have fallen afterwards, for its little hollows 

 are impressed in the footmarks also, though more slightly 

 than on the rest of the surface, the comparative hardness 

 of a trodden place having apparently prevented so deejD 

 an impression being made. At Ilessberg, in Saxony, 

 tlie vestiges of four distinct animals have been traced, 

 one of them a web-footed animal of small size, con- 

 sidered as a congener of the crocodile ; another, whose 



