BY PROFESSOR STEPHENS. 335 



Aitstralis, and Tliinnfeldia odordo^yteroides, which are charac- 

 teristic of that series. And at the same time these heds are 

 found to correspond to the chocolate or red shales just men- 

 tioned. (These appear also about Coal Cliff and in the bores 

 which have been put down between Sydney and Illawarra.) In 

 a paper read April, 1885, before this Society, the Rev. J. Milne 

 Curran maintained that the Clarence River beds are, on the fossil 

 evidence, older than the Hawkesbury, and that the Ballimore beds 

 near Dubbo are the first in succession above the Newcastle Coal 

 Measures. 



Mr. MacKenzie, the Examiner of Coalfields for New South 

 Wales, has quite recently enlarged our knowledge of these most 

 western coalfields by the discovery of Glossopteris, which is strong 

 evidence for even a more remote date than that arrived at by Mr. 

 Curran, 



But a still more interesting fact has been ascertained by Mr. 

 Wilkinson, as he has kindly informed me, in a recent official 

 journey through the Clarence River district. He finds that the 

 Narrabeen beds are at the base of the Clarence series, about 

 300 feet in thickness (on a rough estimate) ; that they contain 

 coal seams which may be of some, at least, local value ; and that 

 they are succeeded by the Hawkesbury beds, which are again 

 (in the Clarence River district) overlaid by the Upper Clarence 

 beds, which also contain coal seams. This is an extremely 

 important discovery, and clears up many difficulties. 



I may, I hope, be pardoned if T here quote a few words from a 

 paper on the Geology of the Clarence River district, read before 

 this Society in December, 1883: — "The road from Grafton to 

 Buccarumbi runs through a poor country of sandstones and shales, 

 undulating in the valleys, but broken by ranges of mural preci- 

 pices closely resembling the escarpments common in the Hawkes- 

 bury sandstone. The false bedding or oblique stratification so 

 common in the latter series is equally predominant here, and the 

 rock faces are excavated by atmospheric action into caves or 

 ' gibber gunyas ' of exactly the same character as those on the 



