Lotoer Silurian.l PAL-iEONTOLOGY OF VICTORIA. [Graptolites. 



Plate I. 



Fam. GRAPTOLITID^. 



The Graptolites are the most characteristic fossils of the Silurian 

 rocks ; aud the first detemnination of the geological age of the 

 Victorian auriferous reef-bearing slates was from my recognising 

 as Graptolites a series of specimens which had been collected 

 from the Bird Reef, at Bendigo, by Mr. J. A. Panton, then Warden 

 of that goldfield. To this gentleman is due the merit of having 

 first collected these fossils from the gold rocks, and he kindly gave 

 me the first specimens seen for the National Museum, about sixteen 

 years ago, when I visited him in company with Mr. Selwyn, then 

 Director of the Geological Survey. Since that period I have 

 identified 12 or 14 species from rocks of the same age, in different 

 parts of the colony, collected during the progress of the survey. 



Geologists may imagine the astonishment with which I recognised, 

 in all of these, species well known to me as occuring in the Lower 

 Silurian or Cambrian rocks of Sweden, Bohemia, Wales, Ireland, 

 Scotland, and the United States of America, showing a world-wide 

 distribution of these species in the old geological time. A still 

 more curious coincidence was the fact of my having, shortly before 

 coming to Victoria, knocked out with my hammer, from the slate 

 rocks of the Welsh old Roman gold mines, at Gogofau, near Llan- 

 piimp-saiut, exactly the same species of Graptolites which I found 

 to be the most common in our goldfield slates in this colony ; 

 showing that the Romans had obtained their gold from quartz 

 veins in slates in Wales of exactly the same geological age as our 

 Australian formations. 



When restricting tbe generic name Graptolites to those species 

 Laving only one row of cells, in my work published in conjunction 

 with Professor Sedgwick, " The British Palaeozoic Rocks aud 

 Fossils," I suggested the sub-generic name Didymograpsus, or 

 twiu-Graptolites, for those species having two simple stems (such as 

 singly would be referred to Graptolites proper) united by the simple 



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