70 THE SUBMARINE LEAKAGE, ETC. 



never witnessed the alleged submarine leakage, and this state- 

 ment must pass unchallenged. Both gave equally indisputable 

 instances of high temperature and rapid evaporation in the West. 

 Mr. Gregory treated the Western interior, as it seemed to me, 

 as if it were a homogenous mass of porous rock in place of 

 having a subsoil of water-tight clay-shales, and insisted on the 

 impossibility of Avater sinking beyond the reach of evaporation. 

 He msisted again on the impossibility of fresh water rising up 

 through an ocean of salt water. Finally, he produced a 

 small map of Australia, on which he had drawn a red line 

 round the heads of the Darling, Thomson, Diamantina, and 

 Georgina, and described this line as one along which an anti- 

 clinal axis of PaL^ozoic rocks comes to the surface, interrupting 

 the continuity of the Cretaceous formation. Such statements 

 receive no support from any geological map ever published. 

 The fact is that Palaeozoic rocks only crop up along a small 

 portion of the line in question, and that when they do crop up 

 no synclinal axis coincides with the line ; on the contrary, where 

 Palaeozoic rocks underlie the line they present the upturned 

 edges of strata disposed at such angles as to prove that they were 

 thrown into anticlinal and synclinal folds, whose axes for the 

 most part cross the divide at right angles. Mr. Thomson 

 summed up by saying that a few facts, such as Mr. Gregory had 

 brought forward, were worth more than all the theories which 

 had ever been invented. I am still under the impression that 

 the facts accumulated on the spot are on the other side, and that 

 Mr. Gregory's " facts" are fancies only. 



The question at issue is no longer whether the water which, 

 when tapped by bores, issues in artesian wells, occurs in porous 

 strata lying underneath impermeable strata. The bores them- 

 selves have settled that, and the outcrops of the strata have been 

 to some extent mapped, and found at altitudes sufficient to give 

 a " head " capable of forcing the water to the surface in the 

 lowlands of the West. These outcrops, moreover, have been 

 detected in the act of absorbing, year by year, more than water 

 enough to supply the wells and springs. The question is, 

 whether the strata form a sealed basin, or crop out beneath the 

 ocean in such a manner as to give rise to a circulation of the 

 underground water. A mass of evidence has been accumulated 



