"gHafurattsf ivt JluslraCia. 



By the Rev. C. W. H. DICKER, F.R.G.S. 



(Bead Dec. 13th, 1904.) 



JJ^HE key to the Natural History of Australia lies in her 

 geological story. She is the oldest country 

 in the world. Her living indigenous inhabitants 

 might justly regard our Eocene and recent 

 fauna and flora as mere mushroom growths of 

 yesterday. As Salisbury Cathedral comes to us 

 from the Episcopate of good Richard Poore, so 

 Australia comes to us from that hour of the 

 world's morning when flowers first opened to the sunshine, and 

 four-footed beasts first trod "the pastures of the wilderness." 



Picture a vast continent covered with Triassic rocks, resting 

 upon a solid silurian table-land, and peopled with those living 

 ferns, calamites, cycads, palms, conifers, fishes, lizards, 

 crocodiles, birds, and marsupial mammals, whose fossil remains 

 are dug up in the coal-measures, oolite and chalk deposits of 

 England. Next, imagine a slight tilling of the whole land the 

 M-estern side lifted up and the eastern depressed below sea-level 

 followed by an abrupt upheaval of the ancient line of the 

 eastern coast to a considerable elevation, and then you will have 



