142 Prof. F. M‘Coy on the Ancient and Recent 
typical sections of Europe, the plants growing on the land might 
have been those of the Oolitic period, while the sea contained 
the living inhabitants characteristic of the Paleozoic times. I 
combated this theory at the time by pointing to the similar 
Mesozoic coal-plants in Richmond, Virginia, at no great distance 
from the usual Paleozoic coal-flora of other American coal-fields, 
both remote from the typical European sections of the two coal- 
floras, but distinctly maintaining there their old-world peculiar 
forms. Nothing can, however, exceed the geological interest 
attaching to the distinct announcement I am now able to make of 
the land vegetation which first appeared, in the extreme remote- 
ness of the Upper Palzozoic times, having been formed absolutely 
on the same type as that of the same period in the northern 
hemisphere; and here I am able to advance another step in the 
comparison between the ancient and modern natural history of 
Victoria and that of the antipodes, by showing that the wonderful 
identity in the marine fauna of the two hemispheres during the 
Paleozoic periods applied also to the productions of the dry 
land, which latter is also now shown to have emerged at the 
same period in Australia as the greater bulk of first dry land in 
Europe and America (the Devonian evidence being small excep- 
tions to the otherwise first great appearance of dry land during 
the Carboniferous period) *. 
8. Mesozoic Period. 
The evidence of Mesozoic formations in Australia has been 
much disputed, resting until lately only on the characters of the 
fossil plants associated with the coal of New South Wales and 
Tasmania. This plant evidence is much more forcible now than 
ever, inasmuch as I have had opportunities of carefully investi- 
eating the fossil plants associated with coal seams in Victoria, at 
Cape Patterson and Bellerine, and for this colony I can now not 
only emphatically repeat the arguments which I used fourteen 
years ago, when writing on the plants associated with the coal 
of New South Wales+ and Tasmania, namely, that all the genera 
and some of the species were closely allied to, or identical with, 
those of Mesozoic coal-beds, and that all the characteristic Palao- 
* Tt will be interesting to geologists to know that, up to a few months 
ago, Mr. Clarke had no stratigraphical evidence to bear out his view of the 
plant-beds being Paleozoic, or underlying the beds with marine Palzozoic 
fossils; and no such sectional evidence has been found by Mr. Selwyn, the 
Government geologist, in his careful surveys of the coal-bearing sections of 
Victoria and Tasmania; and the only section (Stony Creek, Maitland) now 
relied on by Mr. Clarke is, I think, clearly a deceptive appearance produced 
by a fault drawn on a section in which the vertical scale was enormously 
out of proportion to the horizontal one. 
+ Annals of Nat. Hist. ser. 1. vol. xx. pp. 145, 226, 298, 
