ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. xlvii 



stone were held by Dr. Buckland to be the scattered irregular inequa- 

 lities raised by the pelting of a shower of rain on a surface of yielding 

 argillaceous sand, his theory was received with no small incredulity ; 

 and some smiled at what they held to be an overstrainuig of his known 

 ingenious fertility in applying ordinary occurrences in the explanation 

 of geological phaenomena. But the sagacity and soundness of his 

 theory of these appearances has now been generally admitted. Mr. 

 Lyell not only observed similar impressions of rain-drops on the sur- 

 face of beds of new-red-sandstone in New Jersey, but he saw them 

 recently formed on a deposit of red mud, thrown down at the mouth 

 of the river Patapsco near Baltimore, of which he was able to bring- 

 away some consolidated layers ; and he says that, in addition to the 

 smaller cavities due to rain, there are larger ones, on these layers, more 

 perfectly circular, about the size of large currants, which have been 

 formed by air-bubbles in the mud. On the shore of the Bay of Fundy 

 he found that the upper part of the mud had been baked hard by a 

 hot summer sun, to a depth of several inches, and in its consolidated 

 state exactly resembled, both in colour and appearance, some of the 

 red marls of the new-red-sandstone formation of Europe. In some 

 places it was pitted over with small cavities, which he was told were 

 formed by a shower of rain which had fallen eight or ten days before, 

 when the mud was still soft. In like manner he observed the impres- 

 sions of footmarks which have been met with in several situations in 

 Britain, in Germany, and in Connecticut in North America, illustrated 

 by the same muddy shore of the Bay of Fundy. " I observed," he 

 says, " many worm-like tracks, made by Annelides which burrow in 

 the mud ; and, what was still more interesting to me, the distinct foot- 

 marks of birds in regular sequence, faithfully representing in their ge- 

 neral appearance the smaller class of ornithichnites of high antiquity in 

 the valley of the Connecticut before described * ." He ascertained that 

 the markings were the recent footprints of a Sandpiper {Tringa mi- 

 nuta), and he was able to bring away two slabs of the hardened mud 

 with these impressions, which he has deposited in the British Museum. 

 What was highly important, as showing the identity of origin of these 

 recent footmarks with that of the impressions on the ancient sandstones, 

 he ascertained that similar footprints existed in inferior laminae of the 

 hardened mud. He also obser^^ed instances of those ramifying eleva- 

 tions on the surface of slabs, of which we had last year a description 

 and drawing by Dr. Black, in the account he gave us of a very fine 

 specimen from Cheshire, in the Museum of the Manchester Geologi- 

 cal Society, accompanied in that specimen by numerous footprints ; 

 the casts of old cracks standing out in relief. On the shore of Georgia 

 he observed footmarks in progress of preservation ; they had been 

 left by racoons and opossums on the sand during the four hours 

 immediately preceding, and were already half filled with fine 

 blown sand ; showing the process by which distinct casts of the 

 footsteps of animals have been formed on a stratum of quartzose sand- 

 stone. 



* Travels in North America, vol. 11. p. 168^ 



