408 Concerning Foot-Prints. [July, 
another page in the records of the ages. When the tide steals 
slowly out, this deposit of silt is left behind with a smooth, glossy 
surface as before, ready to receive another series of impressions. - 
This is not a rare or exceptional occurrence, but takes place 
nearly every summer’s day on the shores of the great bay. 
The constant accumulation of mud left in this manner by the 
retreating tides, although a single deposit may not exceed a sheet 
of paper in thickness, has yet formed thousands of acres of rich 
meadow-land, like the Tantramarsh and the broad meadows of 
Grand Pré, which retain, beneath their waving fields, the records 
made in the manner we have described, during hundreds and 
perhaps thousands of years before the Acadian farmers made that 
land their home. Sometimes upon splitting open the layers of 
hardened mud that form these meadows, the impressions made 
by the feet of animals are found; often, too, the bones of fishes - 
are thus discovered, showing the manner in which the remains of 
the fishes {hat once swam in Devonian and Carboniferous seas 
have been preserved to our own day. | l 
Another series of markings that are well displayed on the 
shores of the Bay of Fundy, and which are commonly associated 
with fossil foot-prints, are the shrinkage-cracks (or mud-cracks 
and sun-cracks, as they are often called) formed by the shrinking 
and cracking of the mud upon drying, when left exposed to the 
heat of the sun, — exactly as ‘may be seen in every dried-up pool 
by the wayside. Such a net-work of intersecting fissures fre- 
quently covers many acres of the mud on the shores of the Bay 
of Fundy; and these modern mud-cracks often intersect and 
distort the foot-prints that have been previously formed, in pre- 
cisely the same manner as the ancient foot-prints were sometimes 
distorted in the Triassic sandstone of the Connecticut valley. _ 
The discovery of the stumps of pines and beeches rooted in 
what was once the surface of the soil, but now buried beneath 
the muddy deposits of the bay, prove, as pointed out by Pro- 
fessor Dawson, that the land has subsided and allowed the depos- 
-its to reach a greater thickness than they could otherwise have 
done. We can learn from this submerged forest a lesson that 
will be of value to us in all our geological rambles. It furnishes 
one of the many indications that the crust of our globe is not the 
terra firma it has been fancied to be, but is slowly rising 1n one 
place and sinking in another, and is sometimes pushed up into 
great folds from which mountains are formed. Recent research 
has shown that for hundreds of miles along the coast of Chili, the 
