82 Rev. W. B. Clarke on the Age of 



coal was "Oolitic," and as recently as August 18, 1857, he stated 

 before the Select Committee of the Melbourne Parliament that 

 the coal in Victoria, which he considers the same as that in New 

 South Wales, is " really to be compared to those thin Oolitic coal- 

 fields on the Yorkshire coast." There can be no mistake as to 

 this being the position he assigned to our Coal-beds less than 

 five years ago. 



To this I was all along opposed ; and, from circumstances in 

 the experience of numerous other geologists (among them Jukes, 

 Stutchbury, Dana, &c), as well as my own, in common with 

 them, I held the opinion, right or wrong, that our New South 

 Wales coal is not "oolitic," but very much older, lying as it 

 does over an enormous area in immediate juxtaposition with and 

 succession to beds which Mr. M'Coy and other geologists in 

 England have regarded as "Palseozoic" and Lower Carboniferous. 



All Mr. M'Coy's knowledge of the fossiliferous evidence on 

 this question, previously to his arrival in Victoria, was derived 

 from the examination of collections I had sent to England. 

 Since his arrival, his attention has been directed to the palseon- 

 tological evidence collected in Victoria ; but he has never yet set 

 foot on the New South Wales territory, and consequently knows 

 nothing whatever, by observation, of the position of the Coal- 

 beds of this colony. I admit, nevertheless, it is possible he may 

 be right in his views, and that all observers in New South Wales 

 have been wrong. But when he quotes, in his note at p. 142, 

 evidence from Victoria, and puts in italics the assertion that 

 " no such sectional evidence has been found by Mr. Selwyn, the 

 Government Geologist [of Victoria] , in his careful surveys of the 

 coal-bearing sections of Victoria and Tasmania," it must be borne 

 in mind that this assertion is without any weight as concerns 

 Victoria, because Mr. Selwyn himself has stated in print, in the 

 same 'Catalogue of the Victorian Exhibition, 1861," in which 

 Mr. M 'Coy's original paper appears, that " the only fossils that 

 have been found '■' in the Upper Palaeozoic rocks of Victoria are 

 a Cyclopteris and Lepidodendron, and even the position of these 

 is assigned as "only provisional;" "they may," he says, "be 

 Lower Mesozoic." How, then, can " sectional evidence " from 

 Victoria be used in argument, seeing that there no zoological 

 fossils to compare with those of New South Wales ? As to 

 Tasmania, Mr. Gould agrees with me rather than with Mr. 

 Selwyn. 



I have published a list of beds at Stony Ci-eek, near Maitland, 

 in which the Palaeozoic fossils are found over and below and 

 around a set of coal-beds having the same general dip and dis- 

 arrangements as the supposed older beds ; and in the Coal-beds 

 occur the plants which Mr. M'Coy, up to 1857, considered the 



