16 Transactions.— Miscellaneous, 
Ere many centuries have passed away it may be that the remnants 
of the aneient shallow sea, marked on the map of Australia as Lake 
Torrens, Lake Eyre, Lake Gardiner, ete.—which, with their margins of 
black, fetid mud, supporting scattered tufts of salsolaceous plants, resemble 
the saltlakes of Siberia and Patagonia, regions which were also in recent 
times raised from beneath the sea—will be silted up and then drained, the 
climate will be still drier and subjeet to greater extremes of diurnal tempera- 
ture, remarkable as there are now in the interior as far as 18° 8. latitude. 
The Bareoo or Thomson river will eut a canal-like channel through the 
sandhills to the head of Spencer's Gulf as the Darling has done further 
east. Thesurplus waters, after the periodieal deluges of rain in the tropical 
country from which they flow, spread out over vast areas of the central 
depression, and already during very high floods find an outlet from Lake 
Torrens at Port Augusta, where the land is estimated to have risen seven 
fect since the first survey of that harbour was made. 
The change in this region from a mediterranean sea to arid plains 
(where, notwithstanding the 10? differenee in temperature between 
places in the southern and those in corresponding latitudes in the northern 
hemisphere generally, the heat from various causes is much greater than 
in the African deserts in similar parallels) must have exercised a most 
potent influence upon the climate of New Zealand and the adjacent oceanic 
regions, as it does to a considerable extent to-day, when alternate cycles 
of wet and dry seasons prevail over these great levels, now torrid deserts, 
and at other times in great part covered with water; an influence not very 
greatly inferior to that which the drying of the Sahara must have produced 
upon the climate of Europe, and the dimensions of the Alpine glaciers. 
When that desert region which now, ** like an immense furnace," distributes 
its heat around over distant lands, was covered by the sea, and a large 
portion of Europe was likewise submerged, over which came berg-laden 
arctic currents, it may well be conceived that the higher elevation of 
its central chain of mountains, estimated by Professor Ramsay to have been 
from two to three thousand feet at the time their glaciers attained such 
colossal demensions, was sufficient to produce all the phenomena attributed 
to a general age of ice, which may come to be proved to a great extent, 
‘should the project of letting the sea into the great depression of the African 
Desert be carried out. 
There may be grounds for supposing an ice-sheet of vast extent 
to have covered great portion of Northern Europe, Asia, and America, 
at or about the same era, but evidence of its having been universal 
is wanting even in the northern hemisphere, and any evidence of an 
approaching similar state of things in the southern is sought for in vain, 
a —— 
