On Fossil Rain-marks of the Recent, Triassic, and Carboniferous Periods

Abstract

Mr. John Cunningham, F.G.S., in the year 1839, read a paper before the Geological Society on Impressions and Casts of Drops of Rain discovered in the quarries of Lower New Red Sandstone at Storeton Hill, Cheshire*. After he had inferred their pluvial origin, he pointed out the indentations on the spot to Dr. Buckland, who recognized the correctness of his interpretation. When, in 1841, I visited the quarries of new red sandstone at Newark, in New Jersey, in company with Mr. W. C. Redfield, of New York, we observed some very distinct rain-prints on ripple-marked shales. Afterwards, in 1842, I saw similar impressions of recent date, which had been made between high- and low-water mark on the red sand and mud bordering the Basin of Mines, in the Bay of Fundy. Since that period I have been enabled to form a collection of specimens of this mud, hardened in the sun, through the kindness of Dr. Webster of Kentville, to which I shall presently allude. In 1843, Mr. Redfield, in a letter to the author which was read to this Society, stated that he had found impressions of rain-drops in another locality of the new red sandstone, called Pompton, in New Jersey, twenty-five miles from New York†; and in the same year he published in Silliman's Journal an account of the sandstone strata of that place, and of the Ichthyolites contained in them‡. In these beds, many of which are frequently ripple-marked, and which exhibit the foot-prints of birds, shrinkage-cracks