238 THE RECENT BIRDS TRACKS 
entitled to be called a geologist, than a translator of Frois- 
sart can claim to be a historian. 
If you were to examine the beds of Horton Bluff, you 
would occasionally find one on whose surface are mark- 
ings, such as we observe nowadays being made on the 
sea-shore ; some of the layers are ripple marked evident- 
ly by the waves, or by shallow agitated water. All these 
beds were deposited under water in the shape of sand and 
mud. The late Dr. Theodore Harding, of Windsor, dis- 
covered on the surface of one of these layers, the tracks 
of a kind of reptile. The animal had evidently walked 
about over the rock when it was soft, and its footprints 
were preserved just as the recent impressions of birds’ 
feet are now being preserved on the shores near the bluffs. 
Tracks of worms are sometimes found on the same beds, 
and at Parrsboro’ we have found what appear to be the 
tracks of some large crustacean. 
Tracks of animals have been formed, of course, ever since 
the world has been inhabited, and these are preserved in 
rocks of all ages wherever the necessary conditions ob- 
tained, from the Lower Silurian “Lingula flags”* of St. 
John, New Brunswick, to the deposits now forming. 
Many years ago, Dr. Deane found on the surface of 
slabs of sandstone, quarried in the Connecticut valley, the 
tracks of a three-toed animal which he took to be a turkey 3 
but Professor Hitchcock, of Amherst, having examined 
them, showed that they were not made by that fowl, but 
by some bird-like animal long since extinct. Attention 
being called to the subject, it was found that these and 
other footprints were scattered through a great thickness 
of these sandstone beds, and Professor Hitchcock, before he 
died, described over one hundred species of animals from 
* The writer pointed out the primordial of these beds in 1865. Mr. E. Billings 
believes them to be the exact equivalent of the “ Lingula flags ” of England. 
