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Nor can we assent to the assertion, that in his ballads, metrical tales, and rhyming jeux-d'esprit, Southey's essay to be comic results in merely 'quaint and flippant dulness.' Smartly enough he tells the story of the Well of St Keyne, whereof the legend is, that if the husband manage to secure a draught before his good dame, 'a happy man henceforth is he, for he shall be master for life.' But if the wife should drink of it first—'God help the husband then!' The traveller to whom a Cornishman narrates the tradition, compliments him with the assumption that he has profited by it in his matrimonial experience:—

 
'You drank of the well, I warrant, betimes,'
He to the Cornishman said;
But the Cornishman smiled as the stranger spake,
And sheepishly shook his head.
'I hastened as soon as the wedding was done,
And left my wife in the porch;
But, i' faith, she had been wiser than me,
For she took a bottle to church.'
 

And with all their extravagances of expression and questionable taste, the numerous stories which Southey delighted to versify on themes demoniac and diabolical, from the Devil's Walk to the True Ballad of St Antidius, are fraught with farcical import, and have an individual ludicrousness all their own. That he could succeed tolerably in the mock-heroic vein, may be seen in his parody on Pindar's ariston men hydor, entitled Gooseberry Pie, and in some of the occasional pieces called Nondescripts. Nor do we know any one of superior ingenuity in that overwhelming profusion of epithets and crowded creation of rhymes, which so tickle the ear and the fancy in some of his verses, and of which we have specimens almost unrivalled in the celebrated description of the cataract of Lodore, and the vivaciously ridiculous chronicle of Napoleon's march to Moscow.

TRACKS OF ANCIENT ANIMALS IN SANDSTONE

Many of our readers must have heard of the interest excited a few years ago by the discovery, that certain marks on the surface of slabs of sandstone, raised from a quarry in Dumfriesshire, were the memorials of extinct races of animals. The amiable and intelligent Dr Duncan, minister of Ruthwell, who had conferred on society the blessing of savings-banks for the industrious poor, was the first to describe to the world these singular chronicles of ancient life. The subject was afterwards brought forward in a more popular style by Dr Buckland, in his lively book, the Bridgewater Treatise on Geology. Since then, examples of similar markings have been found in several other parts of Europe, and a still greater number in America.

Dumfriesshire is still the principal locality of these curious objects in our island; and they are found not only in the original spot—the quarry of Corncockle Muir, but in another quarry at Craigs, near the town of Dumfries. Ample collections of them have been made by Sir William Jardine, the famed naturalist, who happens to be proprietor of Corncockle Quarry, and by Mr Robert Harkness of Dumfries, a young geologist, who seems destined to do not a little for the illustration of this and kindred subjects. Meanwhile, Sir William Jardine has published an elegant book, containing a series of drawings, in which the slabs of Corncockle are truthfully represented.⁴

The Annandale footmarks are impressed on slabs of the New Red Sandstone—a formation not long subsequent to the coal, and remarkable for its comparative deficiency of fossils, as if there had been something in its constitution unfavourable to the preservation of animal remains. It is curious to find that, while this is the case, it has been favourable to the preservation of what appears at first sight a much more accidental and shadowy memorial of life—the mere impression which an animal makes on a soft substance with its foot. Yet such fully appears to be the fact. The sandstone slabs of Corncockle, lying in their original place with a dip of about 33 degrees to the westward, and separating with great cleanness and smoothness, present impressions of such liveliness, that there is no possibility of doubt as to their being animal foot-tracks, and those of the tortoise family. A thin layer of unctuous clay between the beds has proved favourable to their separation; and it is upon this intervening substance that the marks are best preserved. Slab after slab is raised from the quarry—sometimes a foot thick, sometimes only a few inches—and upon almost every one of them are impressions found. What is very remarkable, the tracks or series of footprints pass, almost without exception, in a direction from west to east, or upwards against the dip of the strata. It is surmised that the strata were part of a beach, inclining, however, at a much lower angle, from which the tide receded in a westerly direction. The animals, walking down from the land at recess of tide, passed over sand too soft to retain the impressions they left upon it; but when they subsequently returned to land, the beach had undergone a certain degree of hardening sufficient to receive and retain impressions, 'though these,' says Sir William, 'gradually grow fainter and less distinct as they reach the top of the beds, which would be the margin of drier sands nearer the land.' He adds: 'In several instances, the tracks on one slab which we consider to have been impressed at the same time, are numerous, and left by different animals travelling together. They have walked generally in a straight line, but sometimes turn and wind in several directions. This is the case in a large extent of surface, where we have tracks of above thirty feet in length uncovered, and where one animal had crossed the path of a neighbour of a different species. The tracks of two animals are also met with, as if they had run side by aide.'

With regard to the nature of the evidence in question, Dr Buckland has very justly remarked, that we are accustomed to it in our ordinary life. 'The thief is identified by the impression which his shoe has made near the scene of his depredations. The American savage not only identifies the elk and bison by the impression of their hoofs, but ascertains also the time that has elapsed since the animal had passed. From the camel's track upon the sand, the Arab can determine whether it was heavily or lightly laden, or whether it was lame.' When, therefore, we see upon surfaces which we know to have been laid down in a soft state, in a remote era of the world's history, clear impressions like those made by tortoises of our own time, it seems a legitimate inference, that these impressions were made by animals of the tortoise kind, and, consequently, such animals were among those which then existed, albeit no other relic of them may have been found. From minute peculiarities, it is further inferred, that they were tortoises of different species from any now existing. Viewing such important results, we cannot but enter into the feeling with which Dr Buckland penned the following remarks:—'The historian or the antiquary,' he says, 'may have traversed the fields of ancient or of modern battles; and may have pursued the line of march of triumphant conquerors, whose armies trampled down the most mighty kingdoms of the world. The winds and storms have utterly obliterated the ephemeral impressions of their course. Not a track remains of a single foot, or a single hoof, of the countless millions of men and beasts whose progress spread desolation over the earth. But the reptiles that crawled upon the half-finished surface of our infant planet, 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 name of Cheirotherium was proposed for the unknown extinct animal which had produced these marks. The dimensions in the several examples were various; but 'in all cases the prints of what appear to have been the hind-feet are considerably larger than those of the fore-feet; so much so, indeed, that in one well-preserved slab containing several impressions, the former measures eight inches by five, and the latter not more than four inches by three. In this specimen, the print of the fore-foot is not more than an inch and a half in advance of that of the hinder one, although the distance between the two successive positions of the same foot, or the length of a pace of the animal, is fourteen inches. It therefore appears, that the animal must have had its posterior extremities both much larger and much longer than the anterior; but this peculiarity it possessed in common with many existing species, such as the frog, the kangaroo, &c.; and beyond this and certain appearances in the sandstone, as if a tail had been dragged behind the animal, in some sets of footsteps, but not in others, there is nothing to suggest to the comparative anatomist any idea of even the class of Vertebrata to which the animal should be referred.'⁵ Soon after, some teeth and fragments of bones were discovered, by which Professor Owen was able to indicate an animal of the frog-family (Batrachia), but with certain affinities to the saurian order (crocodiles, &c.), and which must have been about the size of a large pig. It has been pretty generally concluded, that this colossal frog was the animal which impressed the hand-like foot-prints.

At a later period, footprints of birds were discovered upon the surfaces of a thin-bedded sandstone belonging to the New Red formation on the banks of the Connecticut River, in North America. The birds, according to Sir Charles Lyell, must have been of various sizes; some as small as the sand-piper, and others as large as the ostrich, the width of the stride being in proportion to the size of the foot. There is one set, in which the foot is nineteen inches long, and the stride between four and five feet, indicating a bird nearly twice the size of the African ostrich. So great a magnitude was at first a cause of incredulity; but the subsequent discovery of the bones of the Moa or Dinornis of New Zealand, proved that, at a much later time, there had been feathered bipeds of even larger bulk, and the credibility of the Ornithichnites Giganteus has accordingly been established. Sir Charles Lyell, when he visited the scene of the footprints on the Connecticut River, saw a slab marked with a row of the footsteps of the huge bird pointed to under this term, being nine in number, turning alternately right and left, and separated from each other by a space of about five feet. 'At one spot, there was a space several yards square, where the entire surface of the shale was irregular and jagged, owing to the number of the footsteps, not one of which could be distinctly traced, as when a flock of sheep have passed over a muddy road; but on withdrawing from this area, the confusion gradually ceased, and the tracks became more and more distinct.'⁶ Professor Hitchcock had, up to that time, observed footprints of thirty species of birds on these surfaces. The formation, it may be remarked, is one considerably earlier than any in which fossil bones or other indications of birds have been detected in Europe.

In the coal-field of Westmoreland county, Pennsylvania, there were discovered in 1844, slabs marked with footprints bearing a considerable resemblance to those of the Cheirotherium, and believed to have been impressed by an animal of the same family, though with some important points of distinction. The hind-feet are not so much larger than the fore; and the two on each side, instead of coming nearly into one row, as in the European Cheirotherium, stand widely apart. The impressions look such as would be made by a rudely-shaped human hand, with short fingers held much apart; there is some appearance as if the fingers had had nails; and a protuberance like the rudiment of a sixth finger appears at the side. This was the first indication of reptile life so early as the time of the coal-formation; but as the fossil remains of a reptile have now been found in Old Red Sandstone, at Elgin, in Scotland, the original importance of the discovery in this respect may be regarded as lessened.

Last year, some slabs from Potsdam, in Canada, were brought to England, and deposited in the museum of the Geological Society. Belonging as these slabs do to a formation coeval with those in which the earliest fossils were hitherto found, it was startling to find them marked with numerous foot-tracks of what appeared to have been reptiles. It seemed to shew, that the inhabitants of the world in that early age were not quite so low in the scale of being as had previously been assumed from the facts known; and that all attempts to describe, from positive knowledge, anything like a progression of being on the face of our globe, were at least premature. Professor Owen had, at first, scarcely any hesitation in pronouncing the footprints to be those of tortoises; but he afterwards changed his views, and expressed his belief that the impressions had been produced by small crustacean animals. Thus the views previously entertained regarding the invertebrate character of the fauna of the Silurian epoch, have ultimately remained unaffected, so far as these Potsdam slabs are concerned.

Slabs of sandstone and shale often retain what is called the ripple-mark—that is, the corrugation of surface produced by the gentle agitation of shallow water over sand or mud. We can see these appearances beneath our feet, as we walk over the pavement of almost any of our cities. Such slabs are also occasionally marked by irregular protuberances, being the casts of hollows or cracks produced in ancient tide-beaches by shrinkage. In many instances, the footprints of animals are marked by such lines passing through them, shewing how the beach had dried and cracked in the sun after the animals had walked over it. In the quarries at Stourton, in Cheshire, some years ago, a gentleman named Cunningham observed slab surfaces mottled in a curious manner with little circular and oval hollows, and these were finally determined to be the impressions produced by rain—the rain of the ancient time, long prior to the existence of human beings, when the strata were formed! Since then, many similar markings have been observed on slabs raised from other quarries, both in Europe and America; and fossil rain-drops are now among the settled facts of geology. Very fine examples have been obtained from quarries of the New Red Sandstone at Newark and Pompton, in New Jersey. Sir Charles Lyell has examined these with care, and compared them with the effects of modern rain on soft surfaces of similar materials. He says, they present 'every gradation from transient rain, where a moderate number of drops are well preserved, to a pelting shower, which, by its continuance, has almost obliterated the circular form of the cavities. In the more perfectly preserved examples, smaller drops are often seen to have fallen into cavities previously made by larger ones, and to have modified their shape. In some cases of partial interference, the last drop has obliterated part of the annular margin of a former one; but in others it has not done so, for the two circles are seen to intersect each other. Most of the impressions are elliptical, having their more prominent rims at the deeper end [a consequence of the rain falling in a slanting direction]. We often see on the under side of some of these slabs, which are about half an inch thick, casts of the rain-drops of a previous shower, which had evidently fallen when the direction of the wind was not the same. Mr Redfield, by carefully examining the obliquity of the imprints in the Pompton quarries, ascertained that most of them implied the blowing of a strong westerly wind in the triassic period at that place.' A certain class of the impressions at Pompton are thought to be attributable to hail, 'being deeper and much more angular and jagged than the rain-prints, and having the wall at the deeper end more perpendicular, and occasionally overhanging.'⁷