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Natural History of Victoria. 145 
speculations based on the supposition that Australia, unlike the 
rest of the world, had remained as dry land since the Oolitic 
period, and that the living little Myrmecobius and Perameles or 
Bandicoots were the associates of those little marsupials which 
lived at the time of the deposition of the-Stonesfield or Colly- 
weston slate of the Oolitic period in England. The fact really 
is, that in Victoria there is a rich Tertiary Dicotyledonous flora, 
totally unlike the Mesozoic one; and in Victoria, as in New 
Zealand, India, North and South America, and Europe, the races 
of animals now inhabiting the land were preceded in the most 
recent Tertiary or Pleistocene time by gigantie antitypes, as 
it were, characterized by the same anatomical peculiarities which 
mark the recent inhabitants of the place. Thus, as New Zealand 
had her little Kiwis or Apteryx preceded by an equally wingless 
but gigantic bird, the Moa or Dinornis, and South America had 
her existing peculiar little Sloths preceded by the colossal Mega- 
therium and Mylodon, presenting the same peculiarities of ana- 
tomical conformation, so the Wombat and Kangaroo, the most 
peculiarly characteristic genera now inhabiting Australia, were 
preceded by the gigantic Diprotodon and Nototherium, in some 
measure uniting the osteological peculiarities of those genera; and 
their bones are found, like those of the extinct gigantic Irish Elk 
(Megaceros) of the same period, apparently bogged or mired in 
the mud of the ancient Pleistocene lakes. With these, at Lake 
Timboon and other localities in Victoria, true Kangaroos (Ma- 
cropus) are found (M. Titan) of a size greatly exceeding the 
living ones. With these in some of the caverns, as at Mount 
Macedon, are found remains of recent species of Hypsiprymnus, 
Hydromys, and the carnivorous Dasyuri and the Canis Dingo or 
native dog, the recognition of which latter, I think, settles the 
point of its being truly an indigenous animal. I have likewise 
recognized the bones of the Wombat (Phascolomys).in the solid, 
hard, stony, ferruginous auriferous drift called “cement” by 
the gold-diggers, at a great depth in the sinkings at Dunolly, 
the material being so hard that the jaws could only be cleared 
by a stone-mason’s chisel; this determination enables me to say 
that the age of the gold-drift of Victoria, like that of Russia, is, 
as Sir R. Murchison showed for the latter country, that of the 
“ mammaliferous crag” of England. 
The marine Tertiary fauna of Victoria is highly interesting in 
a natural-history point of view, from the extraordinary evidence 
it affords of the “law of representation, or representative forms,” 
which it presents. Thus a series of beds about ten or twelve 
miles from Geelong, which I believe.to be Lower Miocene, and a 
series of beds on the opposite shore of Ilobsonu’s Bay, between 
Mt. Eliza and Mt. Martha, which I believe to be Upper Eocene, 
Ann. & Mag. N. Hist. Ser. 3. Vol. ix. 10 
