554 president's address. 



We have to congratulate the Royal Society of Queensland 

 upon its inauguration. This Society has been incorporated with 

 the Philosophical Society, which dates its existence from the time 

 when Queensland became a separate province, and which, as the 

 President, the Hon. A. C. Gregory, in his inaugural address 

 delivered on the 8th of the present month, justly remarks, can 

 point to the Queensland Museum as chiefly the result of its 

 labours. I need hardly remind you that it is to the Curator of 

 this successful and popular institution, Mr. Charles TV. De Vis, 

 B.A., that we are indebted for several valuable papers read before 

 our Society. 



During the year an instructive and valuable work of reference, 

 entitled A synojysis of the Queensland Flora, has been published in 

 Brisbane : the author is Mr. Frederick Manson Bailey, F.L.S., 

 Colonial Botanist. A statement of the Fossil Flora of Queens- 

 land, by the Be v. J. G. Tenison- Woods, is appended. The 

 arrangement of the work is based upon that of Bentham and 

 Hooker's Genera Plantarum and Baron von Midler's Fragmenta 

 Fliytograpliiw Australis. 



Mr. B. L. Jack, the Government Geologist of Queensland, has 

 just completed a survey of the Hodgkinson Gold-Fields. Below 

 the water line the reefs here contain a complex mixture of 

 copper and iron pyrites, zinc-blende, galena, &c, which renders the 

 gold difficult of extraction. Consequently some of the companies 

 (like the New Reform Mine at Lucknow, and the Mitchell's Creek 

 Mine near Bathurst), send their stone to England for treatment, 

 In one of the mines he has discovered the Lejridodendron nothum, 

 which species occurs in the Star, Mount Wyatt, and other beds 

 along with Upper Devonian or Lower Carboniferous fossils, but 

 does not range so high as the marine beds at the base of the Coal 

 Measures. Also at the Hodgkinson are coarse conglomerates, 

 with pebbles of limestone, containing fossil corals, probably of 

 Upper Silurian species. These facts are very interesting as being 

 the counterpart of what obtains in New South Wales. 



