THE VICTORIAN NATURALIST ity 
miles from a railway station, it ought in the future to be largely 
used in the principal public buildings of Victoria. 
Near Balmoral, there is an outcrop of the rock, very hard and 
coarse in texture, but of a pure white color, and so much resembling 
limestone in appearance as easily to deceive unpractised eyes. One 
individual actually went to the expense of quarrying the stone and 
burning it, expecting to get lime for building purpuses, but he was 
considerably astonished to find on opening his kiln, that his stone, 
instead of being soft and powdery, was harder than ever, and covered 
with a glaze like that on earthenware. 
So far, no trace of any fossil remains has been discovered in these 
rocks, though search for them has been made ; their generally coarse 
texture is certainly not favourable to the preservation of plant 
impressions, and throughout the whole extent of the formation 
there does not appear to be a single band of limestone. It is 
manifestly difficult to judge of the age of a formation showing no 
fossils, and accordingly that of the Grampian strata is not known 
with anything like certainty. They are underlaid immediately by 
the silurian rocks mentioned in the preceding chapter, while above 
them is a deposit, regarded as Mesozoic (oolitic) from fossil 
evidence, but though the Grampian rocks must thus be younger than 
the silurian, and older than the secondary formation, there is a wide 
gap between two such extreme groups of strata, and the exact 
position of the Grampian sandstones in the geological series remains 
a problem, which must, I think, be left for further research to solve, 
their classification as Upper Palaeozoic, at the head of this article, 
being only provisional. Mr. Selwyn has referred strata, that he 
considers similar, at Bacchus Marsh, Mansfield, &c., to a Devonian 
age, owing to the plant impressions they contain. The late Rey. 
W. B. Clark also inclined to the opinion that the Grampians 
resemble the Devonian, or Old Red Sandstone of Europe, more 
particularly, as like these, they are associated with masses of quartz 
porphyry. 
Although the ranges I have quoted are the only ones now to be 
seen in this district, there is evidence of the formation having had 
a much greater extension in former times. From Arapiles to the 
South Australian border is now a vast plain, but at Mortat, about 
twenty-five miles west of this mountain, exactly the same kind of 
stone is found just below the surface, and has been quarried for 
building purposes ; again at Mooree, fully thirty miles N.W. of 
Dundas, Grampian sandstone appears in a well-marked bluff, while 
farther west still, in the midst of a sandy area near Kadnook, a 
slight outcrop of the same stone is again noticeable. 
These patches of rock however are not after all quite so isolated as 
they appear to be at first sight. If the trayeller crosses the country 
in a westerly direction either from the Black range, the Dundas, 
