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cumstantial evidence, the direction of the wind, the depth and course 
of the water, and the quarter towards which the animals were 
passing ; the latter is indicated by the direction of the footsteps which 
form their tracks; the size and curvatures of the ripple-marks on 
the sand, now converted to sandstone, show the depth and direction 
of the current; the oblique impressions of the rain drops register 
the point from which the wind was blowing, at or about the time 
when the animals were passing. 
Demonstrations founded solely upon this kind of circumstantial 
evidence were duly appreciated, and are well exemplified, by the 
acute author of the story of Zadig ; who from marks he had noticed 
on the sand, of its long ears, and teats, and tail, and from irregular im- 
pressions of the feet, declared the size and sex, recent parturition and 
lameness of a bitch he had never seen; and who from the sweeping of 
the sand, and marks of horse-shoe nails, and a streak of silver on a 
pebble that lay at the bottom of a single footstep, and of gold upon 
a rock against which the animal had struck its bridle, inferred that 
a horse, of whose existence he had no other evidence, had recently 
passed along the shore, having a long switch tail, and shod with 
silver, with one nail wanting upon one shoe, and having a bridle 
studded with gold of twenty carats value. 
In addition to the commencement of Mr. Bowerbank’s publication 
on the Fossil Fruits and Seeds of the London Clay, before alluded 
to, we have hailed with satisfaction the announcement, by Professor 
Henslow and Mr. Hutton, of their intended continuation of the 
Fossil Flora of Great Britain, conducted for some years by Dr. 
Lindley and Mr. Hutton, and lately suspended. 
A Dictionary of the terms and language of geology has long been 
a desideratum to young students, to whose early progress the tech- 
nical terms of the science have hitherto presented formidable im- 
pediments. This want has been recently supplied by two publica- 
tions of this kind, one by Mr. George Roberts, author of the History 
of Lyme Regis; the other by Dr. Humble. 
During the last year the Society has received no communication 
on Mineralogy ; and almost the only volume that has been published 
in England on this much-neglected subject, has been a small but 
highly elaborate treatise on Crystallography by Professor Miller, of 
the University of Cambridge. In this treatise the author has adopted 
