172 THE VICTORIAN NATURALIST. 



NOTE ON THE GLACIAL BEDS NEAR HEATHCOTE 

 By T. S. Hall, M.A. 



( Read before the Field Naturalists' Club of Victoria, \\th Decetnber, 



1891.; 



When one is visiting a locality for geological purposes there is 

 always a difficulty, in the absence of a guide, in making the best 

 use of one's time, and there is great liability of missing some of 

 the best exposures. It is unfortunate that the Wild Duck Creek 

 beds are so far from Melbourne, or, doubtless, we should have 

 heard more of them than we have hitherto done. Sir R. Daintree 

 was the first, I believe, to point out the glacial origin of the 

 deposit, and, more recently, Mr. E. J. Dunn, of the Mining 

 Department, has again called attention to the beds, and has 

 contributed a paper on the subject to the Australian Association, 

 which maybe found in the "Transactions" for 1890. Anyone 

 visiting the locality had better make Heathcote his headquarters, 

 as no accommodation can be found nearer. In company with 

 Mr. J. H. Craig, of Bendigo, I visited the beds, and got out of 

 the train at Derrinal, about five miles on the Bendigo side of 

 Heathcote. Mr. Hollingsworth, a farmer in the neighbourhood, 

 has a fine collection of rocks from the beds, which he kindly 

 allowed us to examine ; and, in addition, guided us to some of the 

 sections and directed us to others. Considerably more than a 

 hundred feet of the beds are exposed, and the railway cutting on 

 the right bank of the creek affords good opportunities of examin- 

 ing the deposit. The great mass of the beds consists of a dark 

 grey clay, which, when first opened, ,is so hard as to require 

 blasting, but which, on exposure to the air, readily crumbles away. 

 On catching sight of the side of the cutting, as the train ran 

 rapidly down the steep gradient to the creek, my first impression 

 was that the rock was a decomposed basalt, with dense nodules 

 in it ; and though the idea was immediately dismissed, a closer 

 examination, when we were on foot, showed a close resemblance 

 on the part of the clay to that produced by the decomposition 

 of such a rock as the older basalt near Melbourne, though the 

 amygdaloid spots were absent. Thickly and irregularly scattered 

 throughout the bed are masses of rock of all shapes and sizes, 

 from sand up to several feet in diameter. Most of them are 

 subangular, and well-rounded waterworn pebbles, though not 

 absent, are, as far as our observations went, exceedingly rare. 

 The pebbles and boulders are in great variety, and almost all are 

 ground and scratched on more than one face. There are masses 

 of granite closely resembling that of Mount Alexander in appear- 

 ance ; others, again, with glassy quartz and pink felspar in large 

 crystals, the mica — black in some specimens and white in others 



