Page:The Geologist, volume 5.djvu/158

134 leave their peculiar imprints. While the mud is drying, it separates and produces what are termed sun-cracks, which are always present in the laver which has preserved foot-marks in the sandstones of the Connecticut Valley."

That the footprints and rain-marks of the Connecticut sandstone might have been made on the banks of a river or estuary, Sir C. Lyell has shown in his 'Travels in North America,' vol. i. p. 254, and vol. ii. p. 168; 'Principles of Geology,' 9th edit., p. 203; 'Anniv. Address to the Geol. Society, 1851;' 'Manual of Geology,' 5th edit., pp. 348, 384; and 'Notices of the Royal Institution,' vol. i. p. 57. Dr. James Deane (who first drew the attention of naturalists to these fossils) and Prof. Hitchcock, in America, have explained and illustrated these vestigial phenomena with great labour and skill.

In Britain we have a plentiful supply of equally obscure phenomena in the Arenicolites, Scolites, Helminthites, and Vermiculites of the Silurian, Carboniferous, and other rocks, and in the foot-tracks in the Millstone-grit of Tintwistle, in the Coal-measures of Dalkeith and the Forest of Deane, in the Permian sandstones of Corncockle Muir, Dumfriesshire, and other places, in the New Red Sandstone of Annandale, in the New Red deposits of Cheshire and Warwickshire, in manifold markings on the Forest-marble, and in the great trifid footmarks and other prints in the Wealden of Sussex. That these great trifid footprints, the casts of which were found by Mr. E. Taggart and Mr. Beckles, and carefully described by the latter, should prove to have been made by the three-toed Iguanodon is not unlikely,