240 THE RECENT BIRD TRACKS 
the dried mud-layers of the Basin of Minas. I have be- 
fore me now a slab from one of the finer-grained beds of 
the Connecticut valley. Except that it is more solid, it 
could not easily be distinguished from a well-baked speci- 
men of the Minas mud. Its surface is marked with beau- 
tifully preserved rain-prints, as clearly impressed as one 
sees them after a mid-day “sprinkle” on the Horton mud- 
flats, and to make the resemblance more complete, there 
is on one side an incipient crack, like the gash of a knife 
where the mass in shrinking had begun to tear apart, but 
had not separated sufficiently to form a complete crack. 
From these studies we must see that the phenomena 
going on around us must be the Rosetta stone, which 
shall furnish us with the key for the deciphering of the 
hieroglyphics of the Stone Book, and that we shall under- 
stand the results of the forces which acted in the past, in 
proportion as we correctly understand their action in the 
present. 
Let us now see what was going on “down east” when 
the Connecticut valley was an estuary. Nova Scotia had 
_ at that time very much the same appearance as at present, 
but the land was more sunken, and the range of hills that 
skirts the Bay of Fundy, the North Mountains, did not 
then exist. The bay washed the northern slope of the 
South Mountains, and the Basin of Minas formed the head 
of the bay. The shores of the Minas Strait were then on 
the north, very nearly as at present; but Capes d’Or and 
Sharpe, as well as Partridge Island, and the Two or Five 
Islands, now noted for their beautiful zeolitic minerals, had 
not yet a being; neither had Isle Haute lifted its lone 
head above the waters of the bay. On the south the 
shore ran along the range of hills, the continuation of the 
South Mountains, from Kentville by Wolfville, and the 
