a ee 
Natural History of Victoria, 143 
zote coal genera, asCalamites, Lepidodendron, Sigillaria, Stigmaria, 
&c., were completely absent, but I can add the very important 
fact that the Pecopteris australis (certainly identical with an 
Indian species from the Rajhmahal beds), with the Phyllotheca 
and other well-known plants of the beds associated with the coal 
in New South Wales and Tasmania and Victoria, are associated 
with numerous species of genera and eyen families of plants 
highly characteristic of the Mesozoic and more recent (as distin- 
guished from the older) eras. Thus I have characterized four 
very distinct species of Zamites in the Bellerine beds, one only 
being rare (the Z. ellipticus, M‘Coy, so called from its broad 
oyate leaflets), the three others being abundant: of these the 
most strongly marked is the Zamites Barklyi, which I have de- 
dicated to His Excellency the Governor, in commemoration of the 
lively interest he has taken in the geology of the colony; and 
another the Zamites longifolius (M‘Coy), I have also seen from 
the New South Wales beds. No Cycadeous plants are known 
anywhere in true Paleozoic coal-beds. I have also characterized 
a species of Teniopteris almost identical with the 7. vittata of 
the Yorkshire (Scarborough) Oolitic coal-beds, and which I have 
described in a paper before the Royal Society of Victoria under 
the name Teniopteris Daintreei, after the gentleman who first 
collected it from the rocks associated with the coal of Cape Pat- 
terson ; and it also occurs commonly in the two other Mesozoic 
coal localities near Melbourne, the Barrabool Hills and Belle. 
rine. As the Baron de Zigno, in his recent writings on the 
Jurassic fossil flora, adopts my view instead of the Rev. Mr, 
Clarke’s, as to the Mesozoic age of these Australian plant beds, 
because, as he says, the early statements of that gentleman, that 
the various characteristic Palzeozoic genera Lepidodendron, Sigil- 
laria, &c., occurred abundantly in them, had not been verified *, it 
will be of high interest to European geologists to learn that up 
to the moment at which | write no trace of them has ever been 
found in the beds containing the Glossopteris, Phyllotheca, Peco- 
pteris australis, the Teniopteris, or the Zamites, and that the 
only Lepidodendron or characteristic Palzozoic Carboniferous 
genus found was hundreds of miles from the beds containing the 
(as I believe) mesozoic plants, and not mixed with them. One ar- 
gument used by the Rev. Mr. Clarke against the Mesozoic age 
of these plant-beds was the supposed absence of marine Mesozoie 
fossils in Australia; but even this argument (of no value, as I 
pointed out by a reference to Richmond, Virginia) has failed 
* Not only have they not been verified, but I can confidently state now 
that any of the supposed recognitions of such genera only rested on mis« 
sma of portions of the ordinary mesozoic forms previously made 
own, 
