630 REPORT OF NATIONAL MUSEUM, 1904. 



Again, in 1848, Doctor Dearie came forward with a brief paper and 

 figures of tracks which he thought might with propriety he referred 

 to some member of the tailed or salamandrian family of batrachians, 

 since he discovered markings which seemed to him as probably due 

 to the trailing of the caudal appendage. In this same year Dexter 

 Marsh, the man who first called Doctor Deane's attention to the foot- 

 prints in 1836, in a long letter to the editor of Silliman's Journal, 

 described and figured footprints which he regarded as those of a 

 quadruped and one that walked step by step and not by leaps. 



Previous to the forties Hitchcock had given names only to the 

 tracks, but in 1815, aeting under the suggestion made to him b}' Doe- 

 tor Deane, he presented, at the meeting of the Association of Ameri- 

 can Geologists, a catalogue of the animals themselves, so far as known, 

 a plan to which he adhered and defended in his paper in the Memoirs 

 of the American Acadeni}- of Arts and Sciences, presented in 1818. 

 In this paper he discussed with his usual caution the possibilities of 

 identification and classification from footprints alone, and while he 

 acknowledged that he had no great confidence in the arrangement 

 adopted except in a few instances, went on to submit the following list 

 of yenera: 



Under these names he described 19 species, of which he regarded 12 

 as certainly quadrupeds: 1 probably lizards, 2 chelonians or turtles, 

 and 6 batrachians. Two were annelids or mollusks; 3 of doubtful 

 character; and the remaining 32 species were bipeds. Eight of these 

 32 he regarded as being thick-toed tridactylous birds; 11 others were 

 probably narrow-toed tridactylous or tetradactylous birds; 2 were 

 perhaps bipedal batrachians, and the remaining 8 he thought might 

 have been birds, but would more probably turn out to be either 

 lizards or batrachians. 



It ma}' be noted, in this connection that, in 1815, Dr. Alton King 

 found fossil footprints in Carboniferous sandstone in Westmoreland 

 County, Pennsylvania. These, though now known to have been tracks of 

 amphibians, were described b} 7 King under the names of Ornithichnites 

 gallimdoides and 0. culbertsoni, King accepting their birdlike origin, 

 though assuring the reader that the "popular error that these are the 

 tracks of wild turkevs needs no discussion." Certain other tracks 



