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Show / COMMENCEMENT OF LA~D ANIMALS. The plants of this era are few and unobtrusive. Equ; seta, calamites, ferns, Voltzia, and a few of the other fa .. milies found so abundantly in the preceding formation, here present themselves, but in diminished size and quantity. This seems to be the proper place to advert to certain !fiemorial.-;; of a peculiar and unexpected character resp?.cttng these Parly ages in the sandstones. So low as the bottom of the carboniferous system, slabs are found marked ov~r a grea~ ex~ent of .surfaces with that peculiar corrugation or wnnkhng wh1ch the receding tide leaves upon a sandy beach when the sea is but slightly a2.'ftated · and not only are these ripple n1arks, as they are galled, found on the surfaces, but casts of them are found on the under sides of slabs lying above. The phenomena suo-O'ests the bme when the sand ultimately formed in these sto 0 ne slabs, was part of the beach of a ~ea of the carbonigenous era ; ·when, left wavy by one tide, It was covered over with a thin layer of fresh sand by the next, and so on, precisely as such circumstances might be expected to take place at the present day. Sandst0ne surfaces, ripple-marked, are found throughout the subsequent formation~; in those of t.he new red, .at mor~ than one place in England, they further bear tmpresswns of rain drops which have fallen upon them-the rain, of course, of the inconceivably remote age in which the sandstones were formed. In the Gre~nsill sandstone, near Shrewsbury, it has even been possible to tell from what direction the shower came ·which impressed the sandy surface, the rims of the marks being somewhat raised on one sirle, exactly as might be expected from a slanting sho\ver falling at this day upon one of our beaches. These facts have the same sort of interest as the season rings of the CraiO'leith conifers, as speaking of a parity between some of the familiar processes of nature in those early ages and our own. In the new red sandstone, impressions still more important in the inferences to which they tend, h::tve been \;bs~~ rved-namely, the footmarks of various animals. In~ quarry of this formation, at Corncockle l\1uir, in Dnmfries~ hire, where the slabs incline at an angle of tbil'tyeight degrees, the vestiges of an anirrtal supposed to have been a tortoise, are distinctly traced np and dovn. the slope, as if the creature had had occasion to pass b:lckwards and forwards in that direction only, possibly in its ERA OF THE NEW RED SANDSTONE. aai ly visits to the sea: Some sla?s similarly impre ed, in the Stourton quarnes in Che h1re, are further marked with a shower of rain which we know must have fallen afterwards, for its little hollo·.~-s are i rnpres~ed in tho footmarks also, though more sl1ghtly than on the r tot the surface, the comparative hardnes of a troadcn place havin(J' apparently prevented so deep an impre sion b ing made~ At Hessburg in Saxony, the ve tiO'C"' of fonr di - tinc.t animals have been traced, one of them a \Veb-foote animal of small size, considered as a cono-ener of the crocodile; another, whose footsteps having a re~cmblance to an impression of a swelled human hand, ha cau ect it to be named the cheirotherium. The footstPps of the cheirotherium have been found also in the tourton quarri above mentioned. Professor Owen, who stand at the head of comparative anatomy in the present day, h expres~~ d his belief that this last animal \Vas the arne batrachian of which he has found fragments in the ne\Y red sandstone of Warwickshire. At Rnncorn, near l\1anche - ter, and elsewhere, have been discovered the tracks of an a~imal which :rvrr. Ow~n calls the rynchosaurus, uniting w1t? the body of a reptile the beak and feet of a bird, and which clearly had been a link between these two cla,se If. geologists shall ultimately give their approbation to the Inferences made from a recent discovery in m rica we shall have the addition o~ perfect birds, thou{Th pr : bably of a lo.w type, to the annnal form of thi era. It i stated to. be In the quarries of this rock, in the vall of C?nnechcut, t~at foot-prints have been found, appar ntly ptoduced by b1rd~ of the order crrall<P-, or wader . "The f~ot~teps app~ar 111. regular succP., ion on the continuou hack .of an am mal, In the act of walkin~ or runni nrr with the nght and left foot a] wavs in th ir r lative };lace T~e distance o~ the i n~ervaf between each footstep 0; the same ~rack 1s occaswnally varied, but to no W at r ar:om~t than may be explain d by the bird havu1a al~~~ fd. Its !~ace.. Many tracl~s of diflerent individu ] an : e~e2t s~ccw.s are uf~en found crossin~ ach oth r, and cr O'/\ d .... d, ~lke Impre swns of feet upon the ~hor of muddy sil e_::tm, .wh.ere ducks and g •e 'e re ·ort." om ~f .~~ese Pl'l.nls 1ndtcate small animals, but oth r d n te .1 ~ of what would now be an unusually lar•r ~ ize. n " Dr. B~lcklancl, qnoting a.n article b. ProC tile Amencau Journal of Seicnce and A'lts, 1 :J6 or Hitchcock, in • |