Notes on the Supposed Coal-beds of the 

 Fitzgerald River. 



By Samuel Dixon. 

 (From a letter addressed to Professor R. Tate.) 



[Read February 5, 1884.] 



As to the mineral pitch or bituminous substance reported 

 for years past to exist in Kangaroo Island, I feel positive, it 

 is washed up by the sea and perhaps borne by it a considerable 

 distance. 



In 1867, I spent a long time on the south coast of "West 

 Australia searching for it, and found it in every case, un- 

 doubtedly brought there by the sea, as the whole littoral 

 between Cape Arid and Doubtful Island Bay is Post-Miocene 

 resting on granite and micaceous schists 



I was induced to make the expedition owing to the late Mr. 

 Roe, Surveyor- General of Western Australia, reporting the 

 existence of coal on the Pitzgerald River ; and it was thought 

 some connection might exist between the known occurrence 

 of the bitumen and the reported beds of coal ; but unfortu- 

 nately for the theory and myself too, the supj)osed coal was 

 nothing but a few very thin beds of brown lignite more or less 

 mixed with quartz pebbles and with fragments of gum of the 

 grass-tree and portions of the seed vessels and leaves of 

 Eucalypts, and seemed to me undoubtedly of the same geo- 

 logical age as the bright-hued sandstones — green, purple, pink, 

 ^c. — which are cut through by the Pitzgerald and its trifling 

 tributaries. 



I am also of opinion that Mr. G-regory is mistaken in 

 reporting this bed of lignite as resting unconformably on car- 

 boniferous shales (see Proceedings of the Geological Society 

 for 1861, p. 480), as there are no shales of that character, but 

 only metamorphic sandstones, jaspers and micaceous schists, 

 the latter being similar to those exposed by the sea close to the 

 bore made by Messrs. O'Halloran and others on the neck at 

 Kangaroo Island. 



The only interest this bed possesses will, I think, be found 

 in its containing the flora of the period of depostion of the 

 Murray Cliffs ; and the sandstones of the Pitzgerald seem to me 

 to represent the original shore of the sea of that period and I 

 further think it will be found that in general characteristics 

 the flora then was very similar to the present, and belonged to 

 a similarly dry climate. 



