52 Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria. 



mostly broken into small pieces. Foraminifera are frequently 

 common, and occasionally constitute the bulk of the rock, as at 

 Batesford and the Grange Burn where the large Orbitoides and 

 Nummulites lie at all angles. In other places fragments of 

 polyzoa form the mass of the beds, with scattered and frequently 

 worn spines of echini, joints of isis, brachiopods and the like. 

 Echinoids, when unbroken, are as often upside down as not and 

 in fact as far as the condition of the organic remains is con- 

 cerned it points to deposition in shallow water where considerable 

 movement has taken place. But besides this in almost every 

 place where a careful description of the rock has been given we 

 find undoubted traces of coarse detrital matter derived from the 

 land. At Waurn Ponds coarse grits and sandy clays are inter- 

 calated with the limestone. Fragments of felspar, quartz and 

 mica are common, derived evidently from the granite area which 

 is partly exposed a few miles to the north-west, and in places the 

 rock is well current-bedded, a feature clearly displayed in many 

 of the blocks of this widely used building stone. At Batesford 

 the polyzoal limestone passes down in places into current-bedded 

 orbitoides limestone and this in its lower part rests on granite 

 and contains numerous granite pebbles. The Lower Maude 

 limestones, which are polyzoal in places, pass down into sands and 

 conglomerates, while the similar limestones of the upper beds 

 contain rounded boulders and pebbles of the underlying volcanic 

 rock. Exactly the same features are shown in the clitts at 

 Airey's Inlet where an eroded volcanic rock underlies the 

 polyzoal limestone which tills deep pockets and chasms in its 

 surface. On the Grange Burn, near Hamilton, the limestone 

 again is plastered down into the crevices and clefts of the 

 igneous rock. The same thing again occurs at Flinders, Curlewis 

 and Keilor, in fact in almost every place where the underlying 

 beds are exposed we find that polyzoal limestone was the first 

 deposit to be laid down, and even when the basalt beds cannot 

 be seen quartz grit is present in the calcareous beds, as at 

 Aldinga, Spring Creek, Shelford, Point Addis. There are of 

 course places where the contact of the eocene with the underlying 

 older rocks is seen and yet no limestone is found, as at Royal 

 Park and Table Cape, but this in no way detracts from our 

 contention for the shallow-water nature of the polyzoal limestone. 



