46 THE PAST CONDITION 



large tracts of sandstone in various parts of the world, 

 in which nobody has yet found anything but footsteps. 

 Not a bone of any description, but an enormous num- 

 ber of traces of footsteps. There is no question about 

 them. There is a whole vallev in Connecticut covered 

 with these footsteps, and not a single fragment of 

 the animals which made them have yet been found. 

 Let me mention another case while upon that matter, 

 which is even more surprising than those to which 

 I have yet referred. There is a limestone formation 

 near Oxford, at a place called Stonesfield, which has 

 yielded the remains of certain very interesting mam- 

 malian animals, and up to this time, if I recollect 

 rightly, there have been found seven specimens of 

 its lower jaws, and not a bit of anything else, 

 neither limb-bones nor skull, or any part whatever; 

 not a fragment of the whole system ! Of course, it 

 would be preposterous to imagine that the beasts had 

 nothing else but a lower jaw ! The probability is, as 

 Dr. Buckland showed, as the result of his observations 

 on dead dogs in the river Thames, that the lower jaw, 

 not being secured by very firm ligaments to the bones 

 of the head, and being a weighty affair, would easily 

 be knocked off, or might drop away from the body 

 as it floated in water in a state of decomposition. The 

 jaw would thus be ^deposited immediately, while the 

 rest of the body would float and drift away altogether, 

 ultimately reaching the sea, and perhaps becoming 

 destroyed. The jaw becomes covered up and preserved 

 in the river silt, aud thus it comes that we have such a 

 curious circumstance as that of the lower jaws in the 

 Stonesfield slates. So that, you see, faulty as these 



