426 Capt. F. W. Hutton on the Origin of the 
as it appears to me, Mr. Wallace’s theory fails to explain the 
whole of the facts. I also wish to suggest the alterations and 
additions that seem to be necessary in order to get a good 
working hypothesis. It will be advisable, however, not to 
limit ourselves to New Zealand, but to take first a wider view 
of the subject; for the faunas and floras of Australia and 
Polynesia are so intimately connected with those of New 
Zealand, that the origin of the latter cannot well be considered 
until a general knowledge of the biological and geological 
history of the Pacific area has been obtained. 
Fossil plants have been found in many places in New 
Zealand, often abundantly and in good preservation, and they 
belong to several different geological periods. These plants 
have not yet been described, but they have been examined by 
Dr. Hector, who has published an abstract of the results of his 
examination in the ‘ Proceedings of the New-Zealand Insti- 
tute,’ vol. xi. (1878), p. 536, and in the ‘ Handbook of New 
Zealand’ (1880). The earliest traces of plants are very 
obscure, but the Triassic rocks contain ferns (lossopteris), 
horse-tails (Schizoneura), cycads (Zamites), and wood of a 
kauri (Dammara). The oldest known extensive flora is of 
Jurassic age; it consists chiefly of ferns and cycads, which 
are closely allied to those which inhabited India at the same 
period, as exemplified by the fossils of the Rajmahal hills, In 
the Cretaceous rocks numerous dicotyledonous plants occur, 
forty different species having been distinguished. ‘These, as 
well as some conifers, belong to species closely allied to those 
at present living in the country, although some, such as 
Araucaria, have become extinct in New Zealand. In the 
lower beds of the system these plants are associated with 
ferns that are also found in the Jurassic strata. The flora of 
the Tertiary era ‘‘is badly preserved, and the collections are 
scanty; but, as far as yet studied, it bears a very close affinity 
to the recent flora of the country.” It thus appears that the 
main features of the present New-Zealand flora are very old, © 
dating from the Cretaceous period, with a mixture of still 
older forms among the ferns and conifers. 
Let us now turn to Australia. No fossil plants, so far as 
I know, have as yet been found in Western Australia, but in 
Eastern Australia they occur in several places. The Paleo- 
zoic rocks of Victoria, New South Wales, and Queensland 
contain Calamites, Lepidodendron, and ferns, in some cases 
identical with plants of the same era in EKurope and America. 
In the Triassic and Jurassic beds cycads and conifers are 
found, together with the same ferns which occur in New 
Zealand and in India in equivalent systems. No plants are 
