PROCEEDINGS 
OF 
THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF LONDON. 
~ Vou. III. 1839. No. 62. 
Feb. 27.—Lewis Llewelyn Dillwyn, Esq., F.L.S., of Burrows 
Lodge, Swansea, was elected a Fellow of this Society. 
A paper was first read, entitled ‘‘ An Account of Impressions and 
Casts of Drops of Rain, discovered in the Quarries at Storeton Hill, 
Cheshire,” by John Cunningham, Esq., F.G.S. 
The author commences by stating, that no person acquainted with 
Geology, can doubt of rain having fallen during remote ages of the 
world, because to its destructive and transporting powers many of 
the sedimentary strata must have owed their origin. He also ob- 
serves, that the vast forests which flourished anterior to the era of 
the new red sandstone, and are now treasured up in beds of coal, 
could not have existed without abundant supplies of atmospheric 
waters. Mr. Cunningham refers likewise to Mr. Scrope’s account 
of the permanent preservation of the effects of a shower, which fell 
on extremely fine ashes, thrown out by Vesuvius during the eruption 
of 1822. The drops of rain formed globules which resembled in shape 
and motion those produced by sprinkling water on a dusty floor; and 
the globules afterwards hardened into pellets, which accumulated, 
at the bottom of a slope in some places, into beds a foot or more 
thick; and they afterwards became so firmly agglutinated, that it re- 
quired a smart blow from a hammer to break the mass. 
The effects of rain described by Mr. Cunningham, are, however, 
of a kind entirely different from those produced on the ashes of 
Vesuvius. They were discovered by him in the sandstone quarries 
in which the footsteps of the Chirotherium were found*; and he 
was the first to assign their origin to the effects of rai. The 
under surface of two strata, at the depth of 32 and 35 feet from 
the top of the quarry, present a remarkably blistered or warty 
appearance, being densely covered by minute hemispheres of the 
same substance as the sandstone. ‘These projections are casts in 
relief of indentations in the upper surface of a thin subjacent bed 
of clay, and due, in the author’s opinion, to drops of rain. On 
one of the layers of clay, they are small and circular, as if pro- 
duced by a gentle shower; on the other, they are larger, deeper 
and less regular in form, indicating a more violent operation, 
* See the Memoir by the Committee of the Natural History Society of 
Liverpool, p. 12. 
VOL. III. K 
