165 
other localities. Mr. Atkinson exhibited to the meeting a 
photographic view of this fossil, which had been kindly lent 
to him by Mr. H. Wilson, of Runcorn, and then went on to 
point out the manner in which, after the curious system of 
cracks had been made by desiccation, he considered it pro- 
bable the shape of the cracks had been changed by the action 
of water so as to form a mould which produced the grooves 
or fillets at the upper edges that had given rise to the idea of 
tooling, as by the hand of some primitive mason’' 
Mr. Binney said that he had noticed these very markings 
in a paper read before tins Society so far back as December, 
1846, and printed in vol. viii, p. 168, of the Society’s 
Memoirs. The following is the extract : “ In the upper 
new red sandstone of Weston Bank, near Runcorn, in 
Cheshire, we have the first positive evidence hitherto dis- 
covered of dry land in England. At Weston, in the rock 
above-named, about thirty-two feet from the surface, and in 
the higher part of the deposit, there is a thin bed of red clay 
from about half to three-quarters of an inch in thickness. 
This clay affords impressions of the feetmarks of the Cheiro- 
therium Rhynchosaurus and several other reptiles, numerous 
worm marks, and beautiful lines of desiccation, similar to 
what a bed of moist clay would undergo under a hot sun at 
the present day. The red clay was evidently deposited by 
water, which afterwards receded from it and left it uncovered. 
When this deposit was in a plastic state, the animals walked 
across it and left their tracks. Subsequently, the sun or air 
by desiccating the clay produced wdde cracks, and the water 
at length returning, again filled both the feetmarks and 
cracks, and made a beautiful cast of them in sand. Thus do 
these most interesting specimens not only show us the tracks, 
left countless ages ago, of some of the most extraordinary 
animals that ever existed on our globe, but they alford us 
proofs of a very <piict'*flow of water that dcj)ositcd the red 
clay — the recession of such water — the drying and cracking 
