190 Prof. M‘Coy on the Recent Zoology 
RADIATA AND PROTOZOA. 
Of these divisions there are no economically useful kinds 
known, a few sponges alone having been applied to any useful 
purpose. 
PALAONTOLOGY. 
The palzontology of Victoria and the adjacent parts of Aus- 
tralia is of very great interest, from the many unsettled scien- 
tific questions on which it bears. 
POST-PLIOCENE AND PLIOCENE PERIODS, 
The most recent geological period in Victoria, as in Europe, 
may be illustrated by the remains of bones found in caverns 
and in the superficial drifts and clays deposited, apparently, at 
the same time as that at which the caverns became closed. 
These Pleistocene and newer Pliocene periods are in Victoria, as 
in Europe, remarkably rich in osseous remains of warm-blooded 
animals, some of which are still inhabitants of the spot; others 
still live, but in other countries; and many are extinct—gene- 
rally of ‘the same type of structure as the more characteristic 
living animals of the country, but of species frequently immensely 
superior in size to any’ that now live—repeating, in fact, in 
Australia that appearance of gigantic antitypes of the peculiar 
geographical groups of zoological structure marking the living 
zoology of the great regions of the earth at the present day. I 
believe the majority of the so-called alluvial gold-deposits to be 
of this newer Pliocene period. In the sinkings into the various 
drifts at the Ballarat gold-fields, remains of timber and the cha- 
racteristic fruits of the Banksia or “ honeysuckle ”’-trees of the 
colonists are common, and apparently of the species still grow- 
ing in the vicinity. In the Glay-beds leaves are occasionally 
found in abundance, and perfectly preserved, undistinguishable 
from the foliage of the common “ stringy-bark ” tree (Eucalyptus 
obliqua) of the neighbouring forests. In these gold-drifts no 
marine remains have yet been found, and, indeed, few fossils of 
any kind; but in some of them (as, for instance in the gold- 
cement” of Dunolly) I have found the jaw of a wombat, 
of the generic type (Phascolomys) so characteristic of the 
southern part of Australia and the adjacent island of Tasmania, 
but forming a distinct species (Phascolomys pliocenus, M‘Coy), 
easily distinguished from the three living species of the same 
size by the greater antero-posterior length of the grinders. In 
the living and fossil lower jaws, having the same length from 
the tip of the incisor td the back of the hindérmost grinder, 
the whole grinding series, of one premolar and four molars, only’ 
