stone pits, on the Blackdown Hills, between Honiton and Cullompton.'
With some difficulty, I at length discovered the gentleman into whose hands this geological specimen had fallen, Mr Matthews, of Bradninch, near Cullompton, Devonshire, and on my applying to him for an inspection of it, he most kindly and promptly sent it to me.
The resemblance of the impression to the form of a horse-shoe was undoubtedly most striking (fig.103), and in
size it exactly corresponded to one of the Roman Gloucester shoes then in my possession. There were no bulgings, however, on the outer margin; and yet it was so remarkably like the shoe, and like the impression it would make on sand or clay, that any one at the first glance, and who was not a geologist, would have had no hesitation in affirming it to be due to that cause. But an examination of the stone effectually demolished such an opinion. It belonged to a kind called in technical language 'chert,' a
