494 PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION C. 
any other I have seen in our district, although even these are 
hardly typical gneiss. They are, however, foliated rocks 
containing quartz, felspar, and mica. These gneissic rocks 
appear to be interbedded with micaceous schists and crystalline 
limestones ; the latter being pure white or cream-coloured, with 
bluish veins. 
The celebrated petrified man is thought by some to have been 
formed of Cow Flat marble. There are numerous quartz veins 
traversing the schists, and the phyllites are often very much 
crumpled and contorted. Quartz- reefs are common in all the 
slate country round Bathurst, but are seldom auriferous. The 
Cow Flat copper mines were once rather extensively worked, but 
have now been closed for several years. In the case of the 
carbonate ores I was informed that they sometimes found lumps 
of unaltered limestone in the centre of masses of carbonate of 
copper, thus indicating that the copper had replaced the lime. 
The rocks about Cow Flat are too much altered for one to have 
much hope of finding fossils, but they may very possibly be 
Lower Silurian. 
To the east and west of Bathurst the rocks dip roughly in 
those directions respectively, and there seems little doubt that 
the area represents the crest of an anticlinal. An immense 
amount of denudation must have taken place, all the overlying 
rocks having been removed, and a considerable thickness of the 
granite itself. To what height the granite originally reached is 
uncertain, but drifts resting on granite are now found at least 
400 feet above the town. The so-called Bathurst plains really 
form a plateau, about 2300 feet above the sea, surrounded by 
higher ground. 
The rate of denudation of the granite would probably be 
rather rapid, to judge from the speed with which the gullies and 
creeks are now formed and deepened by the present low rainfall. 
The numerous gullies, with vertical walls from ten to twenty feet 
deep, struck me very much on first arriving from the old country, 
being quite new to me, and bearing a ridiculous resemblance in 
miniature to the pictures of the canons of the Colorado, and also 
bearing some resemblance to the scenery of the Blue Mountains 
on a very small scale. 
We have, then, in the Bathurst district a rather extensive 
granitic area surrounded by one at first of contact, and after- 
wards of regional metamorphism, if we use the latter term to 
include cases in which sedimentary rocks have been converted 
into slates and phyilites. If, however, we mean by regional 
metamorphism an extensive area made up of true gneiss, erystal- 
line schists and limestones, such as one finds in the Highlands of 
Scotland, then it must be admitted we have not such an area 
about Bathurst. I am conscious that in giving this short account 
of a few rocks, I have not brought forward anything which can 
