Rome and Victoria, 153 



Colongulac rests on the basalt. It was in clay thereon that 

 the remains of the great marsupial lion were discovered. 

 Black cindery sand is on the hard tnfa of Lake Petrobe of 

 Warrnambool. A red clay divides the ash of Woodford from 

 the dark basalt beneath. The Moorabool tufa may have 

 been throvni from the volcanic hills of Pentland, above 

 Bacchus Marsh. The best ash-bed I saw westward was in a 

 crater twelve hundred feet in diameter, eight miles from 

 Mount Porndon, wliich the squatter had converted into a 

 wonderful vineyard and garden. 



But I may be pardoned some extracts from an account I 

 wrote at the time of a visit to the ash-banks of our Tower 

 Hill Volcano, as such a description found interest with the 

 British Association in 1861, and as it truly depicts what I 

 saw also in the banks of the Roman Crater of Lake Albano : 



" Tower Hill Lake is seven miles round. The outlet is on 

 the south-western side. On the east south-east side, where 

 a quarry has been attempted to get stone for the church, the 

 volcanic rocks were of great interest. Beneath the soil was 

 a layer of smaU cinders, some assimiing the appearance of 

 calcareous, hard cement of white ashes. This rested on a dark 

 blue flinty, splintery basalt, of a most unworkable character, 

 traversed by singular seams of lime, and running down, as 

 it were, not only under but beside the white ashes, and also 

 by a bed of black, cindery conglomerate, not adhering, but 

 like a loose mass of small cinders. Under the dark ashes I 

 detected the layers of the common brown ash-stone or tufa, 

 dipping thirty degrees west. Near the flinty basalt was a bed 

 of argillaceous finger-staining earth, in association with a 

 clinker-like cinder. The calcareous ash seemed everywhere 

 running in white veins, through all other rocks. Curiously 

 enough there were nodules of cherty limestone, which must 

 have been pieces of the original limestone crater wall. 



" Limestone rises, and a limestone quarry, are apparent on 

 the western side of the hill, the tufa still lying on the 

 lower lands immediately beside the limestone hills, which in 

 one place were tilted twenty degrees to the west. 



"A gem of a crater is seen on the eastern side of the 

 Trigonometrical hill (inside of the lake). No gTass was gTow- 

 ing uponits fire-blasted walls. The rock was of compact basalt, 

 green basalt, clinker, cinder, mammeloidal, convoluted, 

 laminated, &:c. There was one perpendicular block of cinder, 

 thirty feet in height, possessing some remarkable aspects of 

 volcanic agency." 



