13S THE GREAT BARRIER REEF. 



Tasmania and the Australian mainland suffices to prove that this Barrier Reef originated, some- 

 where about the period of the later tertiaries, as a simple fringing-reef, and that it could have 

 been produced by no other telluric conditions than those of prolonged subsidence. To minds 

 dissatisfied as to the sufficiency of the bathymetrical subsidence to account ior the building 

 up of so vast a coral edifice, a blank cheque on Wallace's Bank of New Zealand, to be filled 

 in to the amount of as many hundred fathoms, more or less, as they may elect to draw upon, 

 is cheerfully conceded. 



