AUSTHALIAX VEdETATIOX AND ITS 

 (iEOLOGICAL HEVELOPMENT. 



By JOHN SHIRLEY, B.Sc. 



[Rend hcforr the Roi/ol Societi/ of (JtifoislniKl, 2ijtlt Mni/, I'-HjC] 



An observer on the banks of the Brisbane River during the 

 floods of 1893, might have observed vast masses of vegetable 

 matter, trunks and limbs of trees, clumps of bamboos, bushes, 

 leaves and fruits floating down with the current towards the sea. 

 The water had the colour of yellow mud from the mass of 

 sediment it contained, and all this organic and inorganic matter, 

 scoured from the surface of the river basin, was on its journey 

 out to sea. Somewhere in the bed of the Pacific, there must be 

 layers of vegetable material, covered by the sand and earth 

 brought down in this mud-coloured water. At some future age, 

 when, by a series of possibly slow but irresistible upthrusts, 

 what is now the bed of the sea becomes a portion of the land 

 surface of Australia, the leaves and stems then buried may be 

 classified among fossil plants Idj the pala^obotanist of that age. 



The records of the Queensland plants of past ages are by no 

 means as complete as those of its extinct animals. The shells 

 of bivalves and univalves and the bones of vertibrates have been 

 far better preserved in a fossil state than the leaves and fruits 

 of trees ; and it is far easier to reconstruct an animal from its 

 skeleton, than to determine a plant from the remains of its fossil 

 stem, or from its detached and scattered leaves. 



Prior to the eighteenth century, when fossil plants began to 

 be noticed, they were almost universally regarded as the remains 

 of plants overwhelmed by the deluge described in the Gth, 7th, 

 and 8th chapters of Genesis. As keener minds were drawn to the 

 study of this ancient botany, three important points were 

 recognised : — 



