42 Fingal and East Coast. 



The coal sandstone itself is of a greyish white colour, 

 fine-grained, homogeneous, and rather soft, with some 

 impressions of ferns, &c. The dip and range of the beds 

 vary at almost every point where they are disclosed 

 throughout the tract of country under notice. We have 

 seen that the transition clay-slates and the crinoidal 

 limestone beds occur at many different elevations, and that 

 the former are waved and contorted in the most fantastic 

 manner ; but scarcely less extensive, though less obvious, 

 are the disturbances throughout the coal-measures. 



During the deposition of the transition group, there 

 has been here, as in other parts of the world, a continu- 

 ous and violent activity of the central masses, giving to the 

 structure of the micaceous and clayey schists above a cha- 

 racter which could alone be derived from the mobility of a 

 troubled ocean of molten matter beneath. After the conso- 

 lidation or partial consolidation of this group, the upheav- 

 ing action, ordinarily restrained perhaps, seems at times 

 to have broken all bounds, and periodically to have thrown 

 the then solidified crust of the earth into unimaginable 

 disorder. The vertical clay-slates are witnesses to its 

 great violence. 



The displacements of the palaeozoic group, and the 

 varying dip and direction of the coal-measures, with 

 their numerous faults and dislocations, the eruptive 

 dykes which intersect them, and the enormous masses of 

 greenstone which weigh them down, all bear testimony 

 that if the volcanic agency generally slumbered, it woke at 

 times into throes of terrific fury. Most of the highest 

 hills and mountain ranges of Van Diemen's Land pro- 

 bably at that period obtained the position and elevation 

 which they now bear relatively to the dry land generally. 



The eruptive forces did not, however, exhaust them- 

 selves upon and immediately after the deposit of the coal 

 group. On the contrary, the newer overlying sandstone. 



