FAUNAL ASSOCIATION. 23 



mud flat upon which the coal forests are believed to have flourished. During the 

 voyage along the coast, a landing was made at Lucinda Point, and an opportunity 

 was afforded of entering the swamp. Part of the swamp was awash on landing, 

 but as the tide receded, it was possible to reach the shore. The latter was found 

 to be a flat shelving beach, consisting of fine marine sand on the seaward side, 

 passing shorewards into a fine tenacious clayey mud in which the mangroves grew. 

 The sand bore numerous remains of echini, mollusca and marine debris, while the 

 mud below high-water mark and above it was penetrated in all directions by 

 the roots of mangroves, by the burrows of crabs, and by a burrowing gasteropod, 

 Telescopium fuscum. 



Masses of leaves, branches and other vegetable material were mixed with the 

 mud, the latter in some places forming irregular lumps and boulder-like masses 

 around the vegetable material. A broad shallow depression, with a few inches of 

 water over a thick bed of mud littered with leaves, led into the swamp. It was 

 evidently the bed of a stream during the wet season, remaining as a series of 

 disconnected pools at other times, or drying up. 



The resemblance of the physical conditions to those accepted as dominant in 

 the Coal Measure period was so evident that special attention was given to it with 

 a view to discovering discrepancies ; yet, had the mangroves been replaced by 

 dense groves of gum trees with their arthropod fauna, the circumstances would 

 have been well-nigh identical. Had the faunal association of scorpions, millipedes, 

 spiders and cockroaches of West Australia been transported to the swamp, their 

 remains would have become entombed in material not unlike that at Sparth 

 Bottoms or Coseley. 



There is ample evidence to show that the coal plants grew on ground of this 

 character, and we know that the remains of fossil insects are associated with the 

 plant-remains. 



The swamp conditions of the North Queensland coast reproduce with great 

 exactitude the presumed Coal Measure conditions, but lack the arthropod fauna 

 owing to the unsuitability of the vegetation. 



Scudder had some such habitat and faunal association in mind when writing 

 his work " Archipolypoda : a Sub-ordinal Type of Spined Myriapods from the 

 Carboniferous Formation" ('Mem. Boston Soc. Nat. Hist.,' vol. iii, no. 5, pp. 

 143 182). Plate X of that work is described as "an attempted restoration of a 

 specimen of Acantherpestes major, Scd." The specimen is represented as leaving 

 the water, in which the hinder part of the body is still swimming by means of its 

 legs, while the fore part of the body is creeping up the trunk of a Lepidodendron 

 (L. vestitum). On the trunk crawls a cockroach (Etoblattina mazona, Scd.) ; and a 

 broken stem of Galamites cistii, Brong., lies partly fallen in a clump of Neuropteris 

 hescldi, Lesq. 



We are, therefore, not without some justification in assuming that the faunal 



