This chapter ought not to be concluded without a short notice of that remarkable rain known to geologists as “fossil rain.” In the new red-sandstone of the Storeton quarries, impressions of the foot-prints of ancient animals have been discovered; and in examining some of the slabs of stone extracted at the depth of above thirty feet, Mr. Cunningham observed “that their under surface was thickly covered with minute hemispherical projections, or casts in relief of circular pits, in the immediately subjacent layers of clay. The origin of these marks, he is of opinion, must be ascribed to showers of rain which fell upon an argillaceous beach exposed by the retiring tide, and their preservation to the filling up of the indentations by sand. On the same slabs are impressions of the feet of small reptiles, which appear to have passed over the clay previously to the shower, since the foot-marks are also indented with circular pits, but to a less degree; and the difference Mr. Cunningham explains by the pressure of the animal having rendered these portions less easily acted upon.” The preservation of these marks has been explained by supposing dry sand, drifted by the wind, to have swept over and filled up the footprints, rain-pits, and hollows of every kind, which the soft argillaceous surface had received. The frontispiece to the present chapter (p. 156), represents a slab of sandstone containing impressions of the foot of a bird and of rain drops. This slab is from a sandstone basin near Turner’s Falls, a fine cataract of the Connecticut river in the State of Massachusetts, and is described by Dr. Deane in a recent number of the American Journal of Science. “It is rare,” says that gentleman, to “find a stratum containing these footprints exactly as they were made by the animal, without having suffered change. They are usually more or less disturbed or obliterated by the too soft nature of the mud, the coarseness of the materials, and by many other circumstances which we may easily see would deface them, so that although the general form of the foot may be apparent, the minute traces of its appendages are almost invariably lost. In general, except in thick-toed species, we cannot discover the distinct evidences of the structure of the toes, each toe appearing to be formed of a single joint, and seldom terminated by a claw. But, a few specimens hitherto discovered at this locality completely developed the true characters of the foot, its ranks of joints, its claws and integuments. So far as I have seen, the faultless impressions are upon shales of the finest texture with a smooth glossy surface, such as would retain the beautiful impressions of rain drops. This kind of surface containing footmarks is exceedingly rare: I have seen but few detached examples; recently it has been my good fortune to recover a stratum, containing in all more than one hundred most beautiful impressions of the feet of four or five