302 Prof. Hitchcock on Ichnolithology^ or Fossil Footmarks. 



in the city of Liverpool.* In 1839, Dr. O. Ward described foot 

 prints and rain drops on the new red sandstone of Grinshill Hill, 

 in Shropshire. These have only three toes armed with claws, 

 and seem to correspond to those in the valley of Connecticut 

 River.f In 1842, Mr. Hawkshaw described tracks in the same 

 rock at Lynim, in Cheshire. They were those of the Chirothe- 

 rium, of Crustaceans, and others " resembling the feet of birds." 

 Some of them show the impressions of the papillae of the feet 

 of the animal — a fact noticed in my Final Report as occurring in 

 one specimen of the Ornithoidichnites from Wethersfield in this 

 country.^ 



In Professors Leonhard and Bronn's Journal of Mineralogy, 

 Geology, fee. for 1839, Dr. Cotta has described some singular 

 footmarks in new red sandstone, some twenty or thirty miles 

 from Leipsic, in Saxony. They are two toed, or rather some- 

 what like a horse-shoe. He did not find them in succession, 

 and yet seems quite confident that they are tracks. He found 

 them only in relief, and I cannot but have a suspicion that they 

 are concretions, as I have met with some of this kind, which, 

 when considerably weathered, bore a strong resemblance to a 

 horse-shoe. It is hazardous, however, on such a subject, to risk 

 an opinion without having seen a specimen. And they seem, 

 moreover, to be recognized as tracks by M. Feldman, who has 

 lately described a smaller species of the same kind near Jena, in 

 connection with tracks of Chirotheria and " numerous tridigita- 

 ted imprints, disposed parallel to one another."<§> 



In Dr. Buckland's anniversary address before the London Ge- 

 ological Society, for 1841, we find an account of the tracks 

 of deer and large oxen upon mud, beneath a bed of peat in 

 Pembray, in Pembrokeshire, and to the east of Neath. This fact 

 supplies an important link in the evidence by which the reality 

 of fossil footmarks is proved. For here we are certain that tracks 

 have been preserved upon unconsolidated mud for centuries, and 

 we know that this mud needs only to be hardened to become rock 

 with footmarks. 



* Rep. of British Association for 1840, p. 99. 



t Ibid, for 1839, p. 75. t Ibid, for 1842, p. 57. 



§ Geologist for January, 1843, p. 18. 



