and Pulaontology of Victoria. 193 



of Germany, France, and England. No species of Aturia lives 

 now, the angulated septa contrasting strongly with the waved 

 ones of recent Nautilus. 



The Gasteropoda are very abundant and for the most part 

 peculiar, several of them being closely representative types of 

 well-known Miocene and Eocene European species, while others 

 are identical with European and North-American Miocene and 

 Upper Eocene species. Of these, one of the most striking is a 

 Dentalium found in extraordinary abundance in nearly every 

 locality of our Victorian Miocene Tertiaries ; and yet no species 

 of the genus has ever been found living in the Victorian seas. 

 The fossil species is manifestly identical with the Belgian Mio- 

 cene Tertiary D.Kickxii; and the Victorian examples also agree 

 completely, on the most minute comparison, with specimens I 

 have from the Lower Miocene and Oligocene beds of Flonheim, 

 as well as with North-American specimens I have from the 

 Upper Eocene beds of Vicksburg, described by Conrad under 

 the name D. mississippiense, without observing its identity with 

 the European Miocene species. This Dentalium, occurring toge- 

 ther with the above-named extinct species of tish so abundantly 

 in Australia, as in the United States, France, and Germany, 

 is a very curious additional instance of the general identity in 

 facies of the marine zoology of Australia with that of Europe 

 and Northern Auierica during the Miocene period, when all 

 of these localities seem to have had a warmer climate than at 

 present. Amongst the representative types the most extra- 

 ordinary case is that of an entire series of Volutes in the Oligo- 

 cene clay-beds near Mount Martha and Mount Eliza on one 

 side of Hobson's Bay, and the sandy beds of slightly younger 

 age on the other side of the bay south of Geelong, representing 

 in the most complete manner the series of common species of 

 Volutilites of the Upper Eocene or Oligocene beds of the Isle 

 of Wight, the Hampshire coast, and the corresponding French, 

 Austrian, and Belgian strata of the basins of Paris, Vienna, and 

 Limbourg. In fact the V. suturalis and V. cingulata (varieties 

 of our species) of the " Tongrien ^' or Lower Miocene beds of 

 Lattorf, near 13ernberg, is so exactly represented by a species 

 which I have called Voluta anticingulata (M'Coy), that, on 

 comparison of specimens with the tip of the spire absent, it 

 would be almost impossible to separate them as the most trifling 

 varieties ; yet the European V. cingulata has the acute regular 

 apex of the spire characteristic of the Eocene genus Volutilites, 

 while our Australian representative form has the obtuse mam- 

 millated tip of the more recent true genus Voluta. In the same 

 Lower Miocene or Oligocene on both sides of Hobson's Bay, 

 we have great numbers of another species, the Vuluta unti- 



