Glaciation in the Australian Alps. 27 



Following the Livingstone Creek downwards from 

 Wilson's Creek junction the kills on each side are more 

 or less planed down in flowing outlines, while masses of 

 dense grey gneiss, which outcrop on the hill-sides, are in 

 some places polished and striated, presenting a moutonne 

 appearance. Three miles lower down, another depression, 

 or old lake-basin, called Hinnomunjie Swamp, is reached. 

 Here are seen deposits similar to those at Dry Hill, while 

 the adjoining hillocks are abraded in rounded undulatory 

 outlines. Still lower, at the junction of the Livingstone 

 with the Mitta Hinnomunjie Station flats, is another basin 

 filled with similar materials. The present course of the 

 Livingstone seems to have eroded its channel in some 

 places quite out of the courses it assumed in Pliocene 

 times, notably between Wilson's Creek and Hinnomunjie 

 Swamp, and between the latter and Hinnomunjie Flat, 

 where the Pliocene river-bed was more to the westward, 

 under the steep ridges proceeding from Mount Bingo- 

 munjie range.. 



From the evidences supplied by the various markings, 

 the heavy bouldery deposits, and what I believe to be heaps 

 of morainic debris in the Livingstone Creek valley, I think 

 it is highly probable that we have here represented at 

 least three interglacial periods since Pliocene times. 



1. The deposits of friable, yellow, unstratified clays, as 

 well as that containing the small angular and rounded frag- 

 ments, seems to me to represent the remnants of a once 

 more extensive moraine profonde, which was the product of 

 the first period of a very extensive area of glaciation during 

 Pliocene times ; whether such period of refrigeration be 

 due simply to elevation of the land surface, as suggested 

 by Professor Tate * or to more complex cosmic and terres- 

 trial causes — such as changes of eccentricity of the earth's 

 orbit ; the occurrence of summer or winter in aphelion, in 

 conjunction with the slower or more irregular changes of 

 geographical conditions — these combined causes acting 

 chiefly through the agency of heat-bearing oceanic cur- 

 rents — and of snow and ice collecting highlands, as sug- 

 gested by Prof. Wallace-)- ; or to the theory of variation of 

 heat of the sun, as advanced so ably by Prof. Siemens, 

 and referred to by Mr. Searles V. Wood, F.G.S. %— viz., that 



* Anniversary Address, Adelaide Philosophical Society, p. 27. 



f Island Life, p. 484. 



% On the Newer Pliocene Deposits of England, Q.J.G.S., Vol. 38, p. 737. 



