Benson.— Palaeozoic and Mesozoic Seas in Australasia. 7 
paper, and in a later one by Marshall (1912). The investigations of 
ge (1909) and Marshall (1909) in the subantarctic islands adjacent 
o New Zealand had led to the discovery of continental (plutonic) rocks 
hse suggesting a former extension of New Zealand to these islands, 
which. may have been continued till it united with Antarctica (itself a 
fractured continent), as the investigations of biologists have indicat 
Park (1910) supported Lemoine's view of the relation of New Zealand 
to Gondwanaland, declaring that “the Palaeozoic areas in Nelson, Westland, 
and Otago are merely the remnants of the fringe of the submerged Indo- 
African continent which appears to have existed up till near the close of 
the Secondary period." Professor Gregory (1910) n equally eine 
concerning t the former unity of Australia and New Zealand. “ Australia," 
he said, "is essentially a fragment of a great rne -land of гатан 
rocks. It consists in the main of an Archaean coign which still occupies 
nearly the whole of the western half of the continent, outcrops in north- 
eastern Queensland, forms the foundation of southern New South Wales, 
were doubtless once continuous, but they have become separated by the 
foundering of the Coral Sea, and of a band from the Gulf of Carpentaria 
to the lower basin of the Murray. The breaking-up ke the old Archaean 
foundation began in Cambrian and Ordovician tim These 
remarks prefaced a short outline of the асат evolution of 
Australia. It might be remarked, however, that the Archaean age of the 
basement schists (to which might have been added those of New Guinea, 
the Louisades, and New Caledonia) cannot be considered as proved in all 
cases. Thus Browne (1914) has adduced evidence of the Ordovician age 
of the schists in southern New South Wales, and a like age for those of 
western New Zealand seems not improbable (cf. Benson, 1921). 
Marshall (1911) pointed out that the comparison of the lithology of 
the Mesozoie rocks on the east and west of New Zealand did not give 
any clear indication of the dreio from which the detritus forming them 
had been derived. He recognized the New Zealand- Tonga line as the 
boundary of the south-western Pacific, but, omitting all of Suess’s second 
Australian arc except Fiji—in which Woolnough (1903, 1907) had found a 
continental basement of granite and slates with à north-north-east strike 
drew the continuation of the margin of the Pacific along 
the outer zone of Suess’s first Australian arc from the New Hebrides to 
New Britain, a palaeogeographic scheme for which there is zoogeographical 
support (Hopes 1899). 
In the same year Professor David (1911) discussed the structure of 
Australia and its gradual growth. His map illustrates a remarkable bending 
of the trend-lines about a Western Australian nucleus, being meridional in 
the south-eastern region, bending to the north-north- west in the centre of 
New South Wales, to the north-west in Queensland, and to the west in the 
ranges of central Australia and the Northen Territory. This simple scheme 
is complicated by the presence of a secondary nucleus or cross-folding 
in the Kimberley region (W.A.), and by a north-easterly branch of the 
Mo om in South Australia, which strikes through western New South 
and Queensland into the central portion of the coastal ranges of 
Quéenilatid near Townsville. Briefly summarizing the geography of the 
past, he drew attention to the collapse and subsidence in early Mesozoic 
times of the collecting-ground of the great Permo-Carboniferous glaciers 
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