that the Rhynchosaurus of the Trias was a three-toed bipedal reptile, as was also the Ramphorhynchus of the Jurassic (Fig. 74); and some three-toed bipedal tracks of the Wealden have also been referred to reptiles. Professor Cope, of Philadelphia, the most accomplished herpetologist of our country, has very recently enunciated the conviction

Fig. 73. Ichnolites, or tracks on stone.

[A slab of sandstone (eight feet by six) from Turner's Falls, Massachusetts, impressed with numerous footprints of bipeds, possibly birds. The tracks indicate ten or twelve individuals of various sizes. Discovered by Dr. James Deane, of Greenfield, Massachusetts, 1843.]

that the so-called bird-tracks of the Connecticut sandstone were mostly made by Bathygnathus, a reptile to which I have already alluded. One fact, however, of comparatively recent discovery I must not omit to mention. Among the lithographic schists of Solenhofen, in Bavaria, have been exhumed the remains of a vertebrate possessing some of the characteristics of both birds and reptiles. The tail, which is somewhat elongated, after the fashion of the reptiles of the same age, is seven inches in length, and consists of twenty vertebræ, but is furnished with a

Fig. 74. Ramphorhynchus (restored). One quarter natural size.

row of quils along each side. The metacarpal bones are four in number, instead of two or three, as in birds, and the pelvis is also decidedly reptilian. Whether bird or reptile, paleontologists have well hesitated to decide. Professor Dana is fully convinced that we ought to regard it as a "herpetoid” bird, exhibiting a transition from the lower to the upper type, a composite type destined in the next period to be decomposed into two distinct class types. Even if we regard the Archæoptenyx as more bird than reptile, and admit that beings of this structure may have

lived at one time upon the mud flats of Connecticut, it does not yet follow that the footprints under consideration were impressed by typical birds like those to which these tracks have generally been attributed. [See Appendix, Note VI.]

I am led, therefore, to dissent from the conclusions of Dr. Hitchcock, and to contemplate the tridactyl footprints described by him as the vestiges of reptiles-perhaps ornithoid reptiles-whose exact organization has not yet been ascertained. It is certainly one of the wonders of geology that so many thousands of footprints should have been preserved in the sandstones of Connecticut and Massachusetts, and so very few bones discovered of the creatures which made them. In fact, the only traces of bones thus far known were discovered in 1820 at East Windsor, and publicly noticed by Professor Nathan Smith, and more minutely described in 1855 by Dr. Wyman. These bones were hollow, like those of birds, and were thought to yield some support to the bird-track theory. But, besides the presumption that the first birds would not possess this endowment of the higher and typical families of the class, it is well known that many Jurassic reptiles-the Dinosau rians were equally possessed of hollow bones. The imperfect condition of these few remains, however, renders it impossible to decide upon their affinities.

The number and character of these footprints are truly wonderful. Dr. Hitchcock formed a grand museum at Amherst College, containing eight thousand tracks. In his report on the "Ichnology of New England," he figured and described from their footprints no less than one hundred and nineteen species of animals, of which thirty-one are regarded as birds, and forty-seven as reptiles and batrachians. These footprints occur in regular series, extending sometimes a distance of several feet over the exposed sur

face of the rock (see Fig. 73). Series of tracks of various sizes and species often traverse the same slab. Dr. Deane sent to the British Museum, in 1844, three slabs covered with footmarks, one of which is eight feet long and six feet wide, and contains over seventy tracks made by ten or twelve different individuals. Professor Marsh is at this moment engaged in forming a grand standard collection of these footprints for the museum of Yale College, and has already created a collection second only to that at Amherst.

The largest tracks thus far observed are twenty inches in length, and were made by a reptile which had a stride of three feet, and appears to have walked like a biped, only occasionally bringing his fore feet to the ground. One of the specimens of this species in the Amherst cabinet is a slab thirty feet long, containing eleven tracks. A slab in the British Museum is impressed by footprints fifteen inches in length, forming a consecutive series of five or six, and being from four to five feet apart. Whether bird or Saurian, it must have been a formidable beast to be seen striding along the beach. Such populations once swarmed upon the plains of the Connecticut Valley, now vocal with the hum of civilized life.

It is a solemn and impressive thought that the footprints of these dumb and senseless creatures have been preserved in all their perfection for thousands of ages, while so many of the works of man which date but a century back have been obliterated from the records of time. Kings and conquerors have marched at the head of armies across continents, and piled up aggregates of human suffering and experience to the heavens, and all the physical traces of their march have totally disappeared; but the solitary biped which stalked along the margins of a New England inlet. before the human race was born, pressed footprints in the soft and shifting sand which the rising and sinking of the

continent could not wipe out. The blood of the thousands and hundreds of thousands who fell on the hundred fiercely-contested fields of the "Great Rebellion," and the traces of the manful struggles which they waged, were all washed out by the next spring rains, while even the ripple-marks of the age of Saurians, and the impression of the rain-drops of the passing shower, are perpetuated in all their distinctness through ages. Man's history is not written on rocks and river shores. His monuments are not footmarks imprinted on the soil and sands of earth, but achievements of moral and intellectual labor, less perishable than the visible records of the ancient Saurians, because inwrought into the lineaments of the indissoluble soul.

Even the imperishability of the records of the long extinct reptile suggests honor, and encouragement, and hope to the mind of man. For what are these Saurian footprints. so carefully preserved, when man is the only intelligence that can duly ponder their significance? Are they not the materials of thought which Providence has kindly stored for a thinking race? words of revelation touching the vast movements in which he has been concerned? gleams of light, which stream far down the avenues of the past, and disclose to our astonished eyes embodied forms moving like spectres of night across the marshes and along the shores of mid-eternity? Well might the heavenly-minded Hitchcock symbolize these teachings by the hinging of a pile of rocky leaves into the similitude of a book. And happily did chance or Providence direct the building of some of the sheets of this rocky volume into the walls of the University at Middletown, where the student, wearied and befogged in the perplexities of human dialects, could look upward to the library-stones of his alma mater, and refresh his soul with the interpretation of the language of the Omniscient.