﻿ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. Ixi 



where the trifid impressions exhibit three marks of phalangeal bones 

 for the inner toe, fonr for the middle and five for the outer one, as 

 in the feet of living tridactylous birds, and in each continuous line of 

 steps the three-jointed and five-jointed toes are seen to turn alternately 

 right and left. In one slab found at Turner's Falls on the Connec- 

 ticut by Dr. Deane, the fine matrix has retained marks of the integu- 

 ment or skin of the foot. This specimen is now in the museum of 

 Dr. Mantell, and the impression was recognized by Prof. Owen as re- 

 sembling the skin of an ostrich and not that of a reptile. Such a test, 

 in addition to the other evidence before mentioned, should, I think, 

 remove all scepticism in regard to the ornithic nature of most of these 

 bipeds. The size indeed of some of the fossil impressions seemed at 

 first to raise an objection against their having belonged to birds, as it 

 far exceeded that of any living ostrich, but the Dinornis and other 

 feathered giants of New Zealand have removed this difficulty. The 

 foot-prints are accompanied by numerous coprolites, and Mr. Dana 

 has derived an ingenious argument from the analysis of these bodies, 

 the proportion they contain of uric acid, phosphate of lime, carbonate 

 of lime, and organic matter, showing that, like guano, they are the 

 droppings of birds rather than of reptiles*. Still it is asked, whe- 

 ther, if birds were so abundant, we ought not to meet with some of 

 their bones in a fossil state, — a remark, be it observed, which is equally 

 applicable to the associated quadrupedal imprints. In reference to 

 this question, I took pains, when on the shores of the Bay of Fundy, 

 after I had examined the red sandstone of the Connecticut, to inquire 

 whether, in digging trenches through the red mud of recent origin, 

 from which the tide has been excluded by sea-banks, they had ever 

 found the bones of birds, and I could hear of no instance, although I 

 saw the sandpiper, or Tringa minuta, making every day those lines 

 of impressions in the mud bordering the estuary which I have de- 

 scribed and figured in my ' Travels/ My friend Dr. Webster, of 

 Kentville, Nova Scotia, has recently sent me some fine examples of 

 rain-drops, which he saw formed during a shower on this modern 

 mud, and casts of which project in relief from the under-side of an 

 incumbent layer of the same argillaceous deposit, thrown down during 

 a subsequent rise of the tides. Thus marked and traversed by cracks 

 caused by shrinkage, and containing the foot-prints of birds, they 

 * Amer. Journ. of Science, vol. xlviii. p. 46, 



