394 Foot-prints of Birds and Impressions of Rain-drops. 
e 
tricity not perceptibly different, when measured by a delicate 
galvanometer. 
But under these circumstances if the long wire be coiled so as 
to act as a multiplier, its influence on the needle will be inexpres- 
sibly greater than the one so much shorter than it. 
Further, from this we gather that for telegraphic despatches, 
with a battery of given electromotoric power, when a certain 
distance is reached the diminution of effect for an increased dis- 
tance becomes inappreciable. 
Art. XVII.—On the Fossil Foot-prints of Birds and Impressions of 
Rain-drops in the Valley of the Connecticut; by CHarues Lys., 
Bsq., V.P. G.S.* 
THE deposit in which these impressions, long known on account of 
the researches of Prof. Hitchcock, occur, is situated in a trough of hy- 
pogene rocks, about five miles broad, the strata, which consist of sand- 
stone, shale and conglomerate, dipping uniformly to the east at angles 
that vary from 5° to 30°. Mr. Lyell first examined the red sandstone 
at Rocky Hill, three miles south of Hartford, in Connecticut, where it 
is associated with red shale and capped by twenty feet of greenstone. 
Many of the beds are rippled, and cracks in the shale are filled by the 
materials of the superincumbent sandy layer, showing, the author ob- 
serves, a drying and shrinking of the mud while the accumulation of 
the strata was in progress. The next quarries he examined were at 
Newark, in New Jersey, about ten miles west from New York city. 
The excavations are extensive, and the strata dip, as is usual in New 
Jersey, to the northwest, or in an opposite direction to the inclination 
in the valley of Connecticut, a ridge of hypogene rocks intervening. 
The angle is about 85° near Newark. The beds exhibited ripple-marks 
and casts of cracks, also impressions of rain-drops on the upper surface 
of the fine red shales. Mr. Lyell states, that he felt some hesitation 
respecting the impressions first assigned to the action of rain by Mr. 
Cunningham of Liverpool, but he is now convinced of the justness of 
the inference, having observed similar markings produced on very soft 
mud by rain at Brooklyn, in Long Island, N. Y. On the same mud 
were the foot-prints of fowls, some of which had been made before the 
rain and some after it. 
* Communicated to the Geological Society of London, and extracted from Vol. 
IM, No. 91, of their Proceedings. We had not seen this abstract of Mr. Lyell’s 
paper when the article on the Ornithichnites appeared in our last number, or we 
should have united it with the other matter of that paper.—Eds. 
