FOOTPRINTS ON THE SANDS OF TIME 47 
antiquity, and of the frail tenure of human works ! On that 
morning, how long ago no one can tell, or ever will know, gentle 
showers watered the earth, an ocean was unruffled, and upon its 
borders primaeval beings enjoyed their existence and inscribed 
their eventful history.” 
And now to sum up the results of their work. Most of the 
tracks so fully described and figured by these two authors were 
probably made by amphibians and reptiles, and it is doubtful 
if any of them were made, as they supposed, by birds. They 
vary extremely, both in size and character. While some are 
only half an inch long ; others, like the huge Otozoum, of Hitchcock 
(see Fig. 5, left-hand corner), are twenty inches long, and show 
a stride of three feet! Some of the creatures that made the 
tracks had five toes, some four, and many of them only three. 
Again, some had hind feet and fore feet of nearly equal size, 
and evidently walked or crawled on all-fours. 
We have here reproduced, from Professor Hitchcock’s work, 
a highly interesting plate (Plate I.), which shows that some of 
the animals had large hind feet and small fore feet, and that 
they sometimes put down the latter, as kangaroos do, for there 
are the impressions of them. However, such impressions are 
rare, and, as a rule, the creatures, many of which were probably 
Dinosaurs, walked on their hind limbs, thus producing those 
three-toed bird-like impressions which are shown on the slabs 
represented in our figures. It is hardly likely that they hopped 
on their hind legs as kangaroos do; they were probably too 
heavy for that ; but they may have made something like a hop 
in bringing up their hind feet, as we have seen the kangaroos 
I do in the Zoological Gardens. Another very interesting point 
brought to light by th^ researches of Hitchcock and Deane is, 
II 
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