Victoria as a Field for Geologists. 17 



veins, but respecting the tenability of the hypothesis I must 

 not venture an opinion. My reason for aUuding to it at all is, 

 to show that in any discussion of that matter that may arise, 

 we Victorians are not likely to be shut out of the controversy 

 by lack of materials for study or illustration. 



On this granite as a foundation are superimposed the 

 palaeozoic, if not the azoic strata. Whether the latter really 

 deserve the name, and vzere actually laid down previous to 

 the existence of life upon our planet, is a question which 

 Victorian observers may aid in solving. Rocks barren of 

 fossils in one land may be filled with organisms to repletion 

 in another. Miners, therefore, whose occupation leads them 

 to delve deeply into these ancient deposits, may, I think, 

 really serve the cause of science not a little by carefully 

 noticing whether the rocks do, or do not, present traces of a 

 life long since passed away, and which, in most parts of the 

 world, has left no record of its existence whatever. 



With the lower silurian beds the work of the palaeontol- 

 ogist really commences. In a brief essay (which I have never 

 read without anathematizing the powers that be for not allow- 

 ing it to be longer) attached to the Catalogue of the Victorian 

 Exhibition for 1861, Professor M'Coy particularizes no less 

 than eighteen distinct species of graptolites, strangely 

 matching with those of similar beds in Europe, America, 

 and other distant portions of the globe. What is still more 

 singular, associated with particular kinds, Dijologra/psus, 

 Tiiucronatus, and D. pristis, there is found in the Bala strata 

 a small bivalve Siphonotretarnicida, whilst in similar slates 

 in Victoria the same forms of graptolite have been met vuth, 

 and, strange to say, similarly associated. The Orthoceras 

 hullatum, peculiar to the Ludlow rocks in England, has been 

 met with in the equivalent beds of Collingwood. At Broad- 

 hurst's Creek, near Kilmore, the trilobite Phacops longicau- 

 datus matches with the same species from the Wen lock 

 shales of Shropshire. Not long since, too, I had the especial 

 good fortune to meet with, in the Moonee Ponds cliff, more 

 than one fine specimen of Homolonotus delpJdnoceplialus, a 

 kind of trilobite which seems to be losing the distinguishing 

 marks of its family (for the trilobation is almost obliterated), 

 which is especially characteristicof the Upper Silurian strata, 

 to which the Moonee Ponds beds belong. In the same 

 locality I also found numerous specimens of a small species 

 of encrinite, which, if I did not misunderstand him, Professor 

 M'Coy considers identical with a species lately brought to 



