ar has two places of pilgrimage. One is a tank
choked with weeds and lotus-flowers, which has a small island in the
centre containing a temple, with two stones in the interior, on one of
which is an inscription and the impression of the two feet of
Gautama--the most common object of worship of the Jains in this
district. The other is the place in the same part of the country where
the body of Mahavira, one of the twenty-four lawgivers, was burnt
about six centuries before Christ. It resembles the other temple, and
is situated in an island in a tank. The island is terraced round, and
in the cavity of the beehive-like top there is the representation of
Mahavira's feet, to which crowds of pilgrims are continually flocking.
In the centre of the Jain temple at Puri, where this remarkable man
died, there are also three representations of his feet, and one
impression of the feet of each of his eleven disciples.

But the subject of footprints carries us farther back than the ages of
the great historic founders of religion. In almost every part of the
earth footprints have been found, cut in the solid rock or impressed
upon boulders and other stones. These artificial tracks, like the
strange human footprint which Robinson Crusoe discovered on the beach
of his lonely island, excite the imagination by their mystery, and
open up a vista into a hitherto unexplored world of infinite
suggestion. They seem the natural successors of those tracks of birds
and reptiles on sandstone and other slabs which form one of the most
interesting features in every geological museum; the material on which
they are impressed having allowed the substantial forms of the
creatures themselves to disappear, while it has carefully preserved
the more shadowy and incidental memorials of their life. The
naturalist can tell us from the ephemeral impressions on the soft
primeval mud, not only what was the true nature of the obscure
creatures that produced them untold ages ago, but also the direction
in which they were moving along the shore, and the state of the tide
and the weather, and the appearance of the country at the time. But
regarding those literal human "footprints on the sands of time," which
have been left behind by our prehistoric ancestors, we can make no
such accurate scientific inductions. They have given rise to much
speculation, being considered by many persons to be real impressions
of human feet, dating from a time when the material on which