Reviews — Geological Survey of Victoria. 563 



followed more or less contemporaneous, covering up nearly the 

 whole surface of the country. Again denudation set in, scooping 

 out the river-channels of the present period, and leaving along their 

 courses, deposits of gravel and clay referred to the Upper Newer 

 Pliocene. 



These Eeports, with their respective fine geological maps and sec- 

 tions, a map of the distribution of the forest trees, and the geological 

 sketch-map of Victoria, are highly creditable to the Mining Depart- 

 ment, and must materially assist and advance the mining industry 

 of the colony. For as the Eeport states, " In our quartz-veins we 

 have inexhaustible sources of wealth ; and enterprise, skill and 

 economy will assuredly, if mining industry be not checked, place 

 Victoria, as regards vein mining, far in advance of all other 

 countries. The area of auriferous ground, but not in all parts con- 

 taining gold in such quantities as to remunerate the miner, is not 

 less than forty thousand square miles. The ores of iron — micaceous 

 iron ore and brown haematite — are widely distributed, and at no 

 distant period the colony should be enabled to supply its own wants, 

 and there is a reasonable prospect of a large return from at least 

 those districts in which tin, copper, antimony, iron, and lignite are 

 found, the latter occurring in beds of considerable thickness and 

 excellent quality at Lallal and other localities." 



The Decades prepared by Prof. McCoy are intended in the first 

 place to give figures and descriptions of the more characteristic 

 fossils of each formation of which good specimens exist in the 

 National Collection, and in future to illustrate the fossil collections 

 made in the course of the Geological Survey of the Colony. The 

 present numbers include detailed descriptions of many interesting 

 fossils, — of Plants, Mammals, Fishes, Mollusca, Starfish, and Grap- 

 tolites, the species of Graptolites from the Victorian Gold-field slates 

 being similar to those occurring in the Lower Silurian or Cambrian 

 rocks of Bohemia, Britain, Sweden, and America, showing a world- 

 wide distribution of these species in the old geological time. Baron 

 von Mueller's observations on the new vegetable fossils are singularly 

 interesting, as indicating the vegetation of the period when the older 

 auriferous drifts were deposited ; they were noticed in a com- 

 munication to the Geological Society (Geol. Mag. Vol. VII. p. 390, 

 1870), but are now fully illustrated in ten lithograms, with detailed 

 descriptions and comparisons of their affinities. They were chiefly 

 obtained from the deep drifts of the older Pliocene formation of 

 Haddon, etc., Victoria, but have recently been found elsewhere, and 

 thus, as Baron Mueller remarks, " the discovery of these remains in a 

 far distant tract of country in New South Wales is not without con- 

 siderable interest, inasmuch as thereby now is shown, that the pristine 

 forests which have left us those vestiges were of wide geographical 

 extent." As far as the Tertiary flora has been examined, there 

 appear to be three periods in which the plants of the lowlands of 

 Victoria were certainly in all respects different. First, the present 

 period, characterized by an abundance of myrtaceous plants; secondly, 

 the period of the deep leads, when the plants were of a tropical and 



