Brnson.—Palaeozoic and Mesozoic Seas їп Australasia. 97 
to abound throughout the great thickness of Upper Devonian mudstones 
which succeed. The sediments appear to have been formed in a widespread 
but comparatively shallow sea, in which explosive eruptions may have 
frequently built up temporary islands, especially in later Middle Devonian 
times. 
The Devonian rocks of Queensland are less fully known, and lie for the 
most part in the highland regions to west of Rockhampton and Townsville. 
There is a very great thickness of conglomerates, sandstone, shales, and 
- limestones, the fauna of which resembles the Upper-Middle Devonian fauna 
in the eastern gulf in the presence among it of Heliolites porosa, Litophyllum, 
and Stringocephalus ; and, as indicated above, the two gulís may have at 
one time opened into one another; nevertheless, Lepidodendron australe 
is as yet unknown in the Queensland Devonian rocks. Possibly Upper 
the Upper Devonian, the sea entered the northern (Kimberley) division 
of Western Australia, and this movement of the strand may thus have 
been approximately coeval with the regression of the sea from the south- 
eastern trough. On a basal conglomerate was laid down a thick mass 
of limestone containing Spirifera cf. verneuilli (S. disjuncta) and Rhyn- 
chonella (Hypothyris) cuboides, together with stromatoporoids. 
The relation of the western to the eastern Australian Middle Devonian 
Burma, nor is it present in the smaller fauna of Western Australia. This 
suggests that the great Tethyan migration of European forms through 
Asia was divided by the northern end of an ancient Cambodia-Malayan 
continental mass— perhaps the Aequinoctia of Abenadon (1919) — the 
* See also Maitland (1905). 
In a private communication dated 24th October, 1922, Stanley says, “ During 
my travels through the main ranges I have discovered i i 
orming escarpments in altitude of 7,000-8,000 ft. The same features have recently 
been met with in the Saruvaged Mountains, Central (German) New Guinea, by Captain 
Retzner. These are not Tertiary, but appear to be cot Du 
ч 
erminous with the Dutch occur- 
rences (the Alveolina limestone of the Wilhelmina Range), and may, therefore, be 
tace I have not seen any fossils in these yet." The Alveolina limestones, how- 
ever, formerly thought to be Cretaceous, have now been placed by Rutten ( 1914) in the 
Eocene. In addition to this, we may note that Hubrecht is of the opinion t large 
masses of crystalline limestone in the south-west of New Guinea are really Permian 
(Brouwer 1919). з ; yp 
