such impressions are at this hour preserved on the
shores of the Bay of Fundy and elsewhere. The diagram represents the
track of some gigantic animal, which walked on its hind legs. You see
the series of marks made alternately by the right and by the left foot;
so that, from one impression to the other of the three-toed foot on the
same side, is one stride, and that stride, as we measured it, is six
feet nine inches. I leave you, therefore, to form an impression of the
magnitude of the creature which, as it walked along the ancient shore,
made these impressions.

Fig. 2.--Tracks of Brontozoum.

Of such impressions there are untold thousands upon these sandstones.
Fifty or sixty different kinds have been discovered, and they cover vast
areas. But, up to this present time, not a bone, not a fragment, of any
one of the animals which left these great footmarks has been found;
in fact, the only animal remains which have been met with in all these
deposits, from the time of their discovery to the present day--though
they have been carefully hunted over--is a fragmentary skeleton of one
of the smaller forms. What has become of the bones of all these animals?
You see we are not dealing with little creatures, but with animals that
make a step of six feet nine inches; and their remains must have been
left somewhere. The probability is, that they have been dissolved away,
and completely lost.

I have had occasion to work out the nature of fossil remains, of which
there was nothing left except casts of the bones, the solid material of
the skeleton having been dissolved out by percolating water. It was
a chance, in this case, that the sandstone happened to be of such a
constitution as to set, and to allow the bones to be afterward dissolved
out, leaving cavities of the exact shape of the bones. Had that
constitution been other than what it was, the bones would have been
dissolved, the layers of sandstone would have fallen together into one
mass, and not the slightest indication that the animal had existed would
have been discoverable.

I know of no more striking evidence than these facts afford, of the
caution which should be used in drawing the conclusion, from the absence
of organic remains in a deposit, that animals or plants did not exist
at the time it was formed. I believe that, with a right understanding of
the doctrine of evolution on the one hand, and a just estimation of the
importance of the imperfection of the