Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 459, page 39 by Various Authors
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radation 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]
FOOTNOTES:
[4] Ichnology of Annandale. Lizars, Edinburgh. 1851.
[5] Ansted's Introduction to Geology, i. 303.
[6] Lyell's Travels in North America, i. 254.
[7] Quarterly Journal of Geological Society, April, 1851.
AITON'S TRAVELS.
A work in any department of general literature rarely appears from the pen of a clergyman in the Church of Scotland, and therefore that to which we are about to refer, under the title noted beneath,[8] is in some respects a curiosity. The writer, a minister settled in a mountainous parish in Lanarkshire, may be said to have made a remarkable e