At Gangautri, on the banks of the Ganges, is a wooden temple containing a footprint of Ganga on a black stone.  In a strange subterranean temple, inside the great fort at Allahabad, there are two footprints of Vishnu, along with footprints of Rama, and of his wife Sita.  In India the “kaddam rassul,” or supposed impression of Mohammed’s foot in clay, which is kept moist, and enclosed in a sort of cage, is not unfrequently placed at the head of the gravestones of the followers of Islam.  On the summit of a mountain one hundred and thirty-six miles south of Bhagalpur is one of the principal places of Jain worship in India.  On the table-land are twenty small Jain temples on different craggy heights, which resemble an extinguisher in shape.  In each of them is to be found the Vasu Padukas—­a sacred foot similar to that which is seen in the Jain temple at Champanagar.  The sect of the Jain in South Bihar has two places of pilgrimage.  One is a tank choked with weeds and lotus-flowers, which has a small island in the centre containing a temple, with two stones in the interior, on one of which is an inscription and the impression of the two feet of Gautama—­the most common object of worship of the Jains in this district.  The other is the place in the same part of the country where the body of Mahavira, one of the twenty-four lawgivers, was burnt about six centuries before Christ.  It resembles the other temple, and is situated in an island in a tank.  The island is terraced round, and in the cavity of the beehive-like top there is the representation of Mahavira’s feet, to which crowds of pilgrims are continually flocking.  In the centre of the Jain temple at Puri, where this remarkable man died, there are also three representations of his feet, and one impression of the feet of each of his eleven disciples.

But the subject of footprints carries us farther back than the ages of the great historic founders of religion.  In almost every part of the earth footprints have been found, cut in the solid rock or impressed upon boulders and other stones.  These artificial tracks, like the strange human footprint which Robinson Crusoe discovered on the beach of his lonely island, excite the imagination by their mystery, and open up a vista into a hitherto unexplored world of infinite suggestion.  They seem the natural successors of those tracks of birds and reptiles on sandstone and other slabs which form one of the most interesting features in every geological museum; the material on which they are impressed having allowed the substantial forms of the creatures themselves to disappear, while it has carefully preserved the more shadowy and incidental memorials of their life.  The naturalist can tell us from the ephemeral impressions on the soft primeval mud, not only what was the true nature of the obscure creatures that produced them untold ages ago, but also the direction in which they were moving along the shore, and the state of the tide and the weather, and the appearance