net, have left
memorials of their passage, enduring and indelible. No history has
recorded their creation or destruction; their very bones are found no
more among the fossil relics of a former world. Centuries and
thousands of years may have rolled away between the time in which
those footsteps were impressed by tortoises upon the sands of their
native Scotland, and the hour when they were again laid bare and
exposed to our curious and admiring eyes. Yet we behold them, stamped
upon the rock, distinct as the track of the passing animal upon the
recent snow; as if to shew that thousands of years are but as nothing
amidst eternity--and, as it were, in mockery of the fleeting,
perishable course of the mightiest potentates among mankind.'

The formation of the slabs, and the preservation of the footprints,
are processes which the geologist can easily explain. A beach on which
animals have left the marks of their feet, becomes sufficiently
hardened to retain the impressions; another layer of sand or mud is
laid down by perhaps the next tide, covering up the first, and
protecting it from all subsequent injury. Thousands of years after,
the quarryman breaks up the layers, and finds on the one surface the
impression of the animal, while the lower face of the superincumbent
layer presents a cast of that impression, thus giving us in fact a
double memorial of one event. At Wolfville, on the Bay of Fundy, Sir
Charles Lyell some years ago observed a number of marks on the surface
of a red marly mud which was gradually hardening on the sea-shore.
They were the footprints of the sand-piper, a bird of which he saw
flights daily running along the water's edge, and often leaving thirty
or more similar impressions in a straight line, parallel to the
borders of the estuary. He picked up some slabs of this dried mud, and
splitting one of them up, found a surface within which bore two lines
of the same kind of footprints. Here is an example before our living
eyes, of the processes concerned in producing and preserving the
fossil footprints of the New Red Sandstone.

Some years after the Annandale footprints had attracted attention,
some slab surfaces of the same formation in Saxony and England were
found bearing an impression of a more arresting character. It
resembled the impression that would be made by the palm and extended
fingers and thumb of the human hand, but a hand much thicker and
flabbier than is commonly seen. The appropriate