508 GREAT SERPENTINE BELT OF NEW SOUTH WALES, L, 



Plants — Lepidodendron australe has been reported from 

 Burindi and Eulowrie, but is to be very doubtfully referred to 

 the Carboniferous Marine Series. 



Lepidodendron veltheimianum has been recorded from Clarence- 

 town (Ann. Rept. Dept. Mines for 1898, p. 167). 



The thickness of the fossiliferous marine beds, at Burindi, is 

 about 1,000-1,500 feet, but it is not yet possible to define their 

 lower limit. In the Clarencetown area, Messrs. Jaquet and Harper 

 suggested that the Marine Series, volcanics, and conglomerates 

 (equivalent of the Rocky Creek Beds), together amount to 19,000 

 ft. in thickness(H), but there is probably repetition here. 



(a) The Rocky Creek Conglomerates form one of the most per- 

 sistent horizons in New South Wales. They consist of heavy con- 

 glomerates containing pebbles of acid igneous rocks, granite, 

 aplites, quartz-porphyries, rhyolites, etc., with trachytes, dacites, 

 and andesites. These conglomerates are interbedded with flows of 

 rhyolite, trachyte or andesite, of a similar nature to that of the 

 pebbles in the conglomerate, together with beds of tuff of the same 

 variety of composition, passing into tuffaceous and gritty sand- 

 stones. They occur, in the north, in the Slaughterhouse Creek 

 Ranges, and extend thence south to Rocky Creek, and the eastern 

 slopes of the Nandewar Mountains, pass west of Burindi, and are 

 cut out near the head of the Manilla River. They commence again 

 further to the south, beyond the limits of the map given, and may 

 be followed thence from the south-west of Goonoo Goonoo, past 

 Gundy down into the districts of Gosforth, Paterson, and Clarence- 

 town in the vicinity of Maitland and Newcastle. This intermittent 

 line of outcrop is thus roughly parallel to the serpentine-line, lying 

 from 20-40 miles west of it, and extending for 200 miles. The beds 

 have also a considerable lateral extension to the west, for the intri- 

 cate series of Carboniferous volcanic rocks, recently described by 

 Messrs. Walkom and Browne(i3) at Pokolbin, 50 miles south-west 

 of Newcastle, undoubtedly belong to this series. With the excep- 

 tion of the last rocks, and those developed at Clarencetown, no part 

 of this huge extent of conglomerates and volcanics has been studied 

 in any detail as yet. 



