186 SKETCHES OF CREATION. 



face of the rock (see Fig. 73). Series of tracks of various 

 sizes and species often traverse the same slab. Dr„ Deane 

 sent to the British Museum, in 1844, three slabs covered 

 with footmarks, one of which is eight feet long and six feet 

 wide, and contains over seventy tracks made by ten or 

 twelve different individuals. Professor Marsh is at this 

 moment engaged in forming a grand standard collection of 

 these footprints for the museum of Yale College, and has al- 

 ready created a collection second only to that at Amherst. 



The largest tracks thus far observed are twenty inches 

 in length, and were made by a reptile which had a stride 

 of three feet, and appears to have walked like a biped, only 

 occasionally bringing his fore feet to the ground. One of 

 the specimens of this species in the Amherst cabinet is a 

 slab thirty feet long, containing eleven tracks. A slab in 

 the British Museum is impressed by footprints fifteen inches 

 in length, forming a consecutive series of five or six, and 

 being from four to five feet apart. Whether bird or Sau- 

 rian, it must have been a formidable beast to be seen strid- 

 ing along the beach. Such populations once swarmed upon 

 the plains of the Connecticut Valley, now vocal with the 

 hum of civilized life. 



It is a solemn and impressive thought that the footprints 

 of these dumb and senseless creatures have been preserved 

 in all their perfection for thousands of ages, while so many 

 of the works of man which date but a century back have 

 been obliterated from the records of time. Kings and con- 

 querors have marched at the head of armies across conti- 

 nents, and piled up aggregates of human suffering and ex- 

 perience to the heavens, and all the physical traces of their 

 march have totally disappeared; but the solitary biped 

 which stalked alono^ the margins of a New England inlet 

 before the human race was born, pressed footprints in the 

 soft and shifting sand which the rising and sinking of the 



