OOLITIC ERA. 141 



Australia, As in its external, so in its vital conditions the 

 oolitic epoch finds its newest analogue in the flora and 

 fauna of the Australasian continent, thus indicating once 

 more the connection that invariably subsists between the 

 manifestations of life, and the conditions by which they are 

 surrounded. "The close approximation," remarks Profes- 

 sor Owen, "of the amphitherium and phascolotherium to 

 marsupial genera, now confined to New South Wales and 

 Van Die man's Land, leads us to reflect upon the interesting 

 correspondence between other organic remains of the British 

 oolite and other existing forms now confined to the Aus- 

 tralian continent and adjoining seas. Here, for example, 

 swims the cestracion which has given the key to the nature 

 of the palates from our oolite, now recognised as the teeth of 

 congeneric gigantic forms of cartilaginous fishes. Not only 

 trigoniw, but living terebratulce exist, and the latter abun- 

 dantly, in Australian seas, yielding food to the cestracion, 

 as their extinct analogues doubtless did to the allied cartila- 

 ginous fishes called acrodi, psammodi, &c. Araucarise and 

 cycadaceous plants likewise flourish on the Australian con- 

 tinent, where marsupial quadrupeds abound, and thus ap- 

 pear to complete a picture of an ancient condition of the 

 earth's surface, which has been superseded in our hemi- 

 sphere by other strata, and a higher type of mammalian 

 organisation." This picture, however, must be received as 

 nothing more than the merest analogy. Nature never re- 

 peats herself in time any more than in space, and forms 

 once. gone disappear for ever. To speak, as some have done, 

 of Australia being " a belated portion of the earth's surface," 

 is altogether to misinterpret the scheme of creational pro- 

 gress. The species of the oolite are not the species of 

 Australia, while fossil evidence already shows that the pre- 

 sent races of the Austral islands have had their gigantic 

 tertiary predecessors, just as other regions have had theirs, 



