president's address — SECTION C. 101 



singla completely continuous mass at one and tlie same time" (Hut- 

 ton, 1873); it was more probably " an unstable area, at one time 

 dissolving into an archipelago, at another resolving itself into a 

 continent " (Hedley, 1899). Thus the direct conneLxioii of An- 

 tarctica may have been at one time with Australia, at another with 

 New Zealand. 



The occurrence of Glossopteris in each of the southern continents 

 leads to the conception of Gondwana Land, a congerie of continental 

 masses lying south of the Tethys at the close of Palaeozoic times. 

 Thi;j grouping of landmasses was linked more closely together by 

 the discovery of the same plant by Dr. Wilson and Captain Scott 

 very near to the South Pole itself. The long uncertainty as to 

 whether Glossopteris occurs in New Zealand, on the western 

 Pacific margin of that mass of lands, has been answered in the 

 negative by Arber (1917), though Seward (1914) has indicated 

 that, in his view, the matter is not yet completely closed. No in- 

 dubitable example of the plant has, however, been found yet in 

 New Zealand, and, therefore, Arber held that there is no evidence 

 that New Zealand was connected with Australia or Antarctica in 

 late Palaeozoic times. Since he wrote, it has been shown that 

 marine beds, without any known plant-bearinc estuarine intercala- 

 tions, were deposited in New Zealand at the time when Glos- 

 sopteris flourished in the Australian region. The Permian marine 

 fauna of New Zealand, so far as it is known, is entirely of the Aus- 

 tralian littoral typ&, which probably developed in an epicontinental 

 extension from the Permian Tethys, flooding over Eastern Aus- 

 tralasia (compare David, 1919), aijd it does not include even the 

 Tethyan cephalopods that occurred in the coeval recks in New 

 Caledonia, though the Australian form Aphanaia is known there 

 also. 



In the Upper Triassic and Jurassic periods, tha marine fauna 

 of New Zealand is Tethyan and circumpacific m character, as 

 Trehmann (1918) has proved the relationship of the Upper Triassic 

 fauna with that of New Caladcnia being particularly close. 

 The investigations of the earlier Mesozoic floras show that, 

 though much less rich than those of Australia, they are, 

 nevertheless, akin thereto, and we may, perhaps, hold 

 that in " Rhaetic and probably also in Jurassic times, New 

 Zealand and Tasmania were united with Australia as one large 

 connected land-area. The floras of these now separated regions 

 are nearly allied, but not identical, but the similarity between 

 them is probably sufficient to allow of this hypothes^'s " (Arber 

 1917). The same is the conclusion drawn by Walkom (1918), from 

 his exce^edingly important studies of the Australian Mesozoic 

 floras. It has been suggested above that the New Zealand forms 

 represent the hardy elements in the Australasian flora, the migra- 

 tion of which, back and forth, followed the fluctuation of the 

 shore-line on the broad continental shelf, which cccupied the New 



