JO:S-ES— TEAILS, TRACKS, A^D SUEFACE-MAEKINGS. 
for ; but, recollecting Mr. A. Hancock's remarks on tbe 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 
tlie 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. 1 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. 
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. Tlie Bev. 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 slopped 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 sliglitly depressed area remaining moist after the other 
YOL. V. S 
ritr. 1 . — A piece of the dried clay bed of a pond in the Isle of AVisht, 
showing the convex roofs of small galleries made by burrowing 
water-insects. 1 ^, a portion of the cnt edge, showing a section 
of some of the gallerie?. (Nat. size.) 
