REMARKS ON SOME PECULIAR IMPRESSIONS 



SANDSTONE OF THE CHEMUNG GROUP, NEW YORK 



By James Hall and R. P. Whitfield. 



During the summer of 1869, while engaged in some geological 

 investigations in Cattaraugus county, 'New York, the Rev. Sjlv,ester 

 Cowles, of Gowanda, was visited, for the purpose of obtaining some 

 definite knowledge in relation to certain fossil impressions in sand- 

 stone, commonly known as " horse tracks," occurring in the vici- 

 nity of Salamanca, Cattaraugus county, to which Mr. Cowles had 

 called the attention of several persons during the previous year, and 

 had also sent specimens to diiferent institutions. So far as known, 

 no satisfactory explanation of the nature of these impressions had 

 been given up to this time; but as the sandstones in which they 

 occur belong to the Chemung group, it is impossible that they can 

 have had anything like the origin popularly assigned to them. 



At the house of Mr. Cowles a small slab was seen, which had been 

 obtained at Randolph, or South Valley, Cattaraugus county, bearing 

 impressions of small size, but too indistinct to aiford means for 

 determining their true nature; but on visiting Salamanca in company 

 with Mr. Cowles, large numbers of them were found, and in a good 

 degree of perfection. On examining them, on the ground, the fact 

 that any one had been led to consider them as genuine horse tracks, 

 did not appear at all astonishing. An area of several acres in extent, 

 from which the forest had been recently cut, and the refuse material 

 burned, was thickly strewn with large blocks of a clean -grained, 

 heavy-bedded, quartzose sandstone, remarkably free from calcareous 

 matter, and in most parrts of a fine-grained texture, but occasionally 

 passing into a coarse conglomerate, containing quartz pebbles of half 

 an inch or more in diameter, and being apparently a continuation of 

 the conglomerate beds which form the so-called " rock city," about 

 four miles in a northerly direction from this place. The surfaces of 

 these blocks were thickly covered with these impressions or '' horse- 



