JONES — TRAILS, TRACKS, A^J) SURFACE-MARKINGS. 129 



for ; but, recollecting Mr. A. Hancock's remarks on the so-called An- 

 nelide tracks, published in the 'Annals of Natural History,' 3rd series,^ 

 vol. ii. p. 443, plates 14-19, I looked carefully on the wetter parts of 

 the clay, along the edges of the puddles, and soon saw little beetle- 

 like insects boring into the clay, and apparently traversing such gal- 

 leries, just beneath the surface", as the little narrow convex sinuous 

 markings may be due to. One of these insects I enclosed alive in its 

 clay habitat, but I could not afterwards find it, when I had the spe- 

 cimen of surface-marked clay at home. The cut edges of the pieces 

 of clay show the openings of the numerous little galleries (fig. I h). 

 Some of them are close to the surface ; some are an eighth of an inch 

 or more below : in the latter case, probably the roof of the gallery 

 received coatings of mud after it was raised up, retaining its convexity. 



¥ig. ] . — A piece of the dried clay bed of a jiond in the Isle of Wight, 

 showing the convex roofs of small galleries made by burrowing 

 water-insects. 1 3, a portion of the cut edge, showing a section 

 of some of the galleriee. (Nat. size.) 



At some spots the roofs of the galleries were the only markings of 

 the surfaces ; at other places the concave trails were most abundant. 

 The origin of these was obscure ; for the pools were too temporary 

 to be the home of molluscs or crustaceans ; insects or worms, there- 

 fore, may have caused them. The Eev. Mr. Hislop showed me, not 

 long since, a specimen of hard reddish shale (possibly of Triassic 

 age) from Korhadi, Central India, on which one of the many superfi- 

 cial long, narrow, hollow trails stopped short with what certainly ap- 

 peared to be an insect, coated with muddy matter, and entangled, 

 as it were, in the clay whilst ploughing its little furrow. 



In fig. 2, we have some faint rain-prints at one corner (a^, — nume- 

 rous small bubble-rings over a large portion of the surface, — several 

 deep, long, concave trails all over the specimen, — three or four faint 

 convex gallery-marks, and some footprints of birds. The latest bird- 

 track shows three footprints, deeply marked on the bubbly surface, 

 probably a slightly depressed area remaining moist after the other 



YOL. Y. S 



