334 Transactions. — Geology. 



South Africa a similar mixing of an apparently older marine fauna with a 

 younger terrestrial flora has been observed, and that universally it has been 

 admitted that the same explanation as that given for the coal fields in New 

 South Wales has also to be applied to both those countries. 



Considering the same character and sequence of the rocks overlying 

 both the shell and plant beds, I have always held that the facts observed 

 in New South Wales should guide us in New Zealand, and consequently 

 that the beds under review ought to be classified as young paleozoic. In 

 the geological maps, issued by the director of the New Zealand Geological 

 Survey in 1869 and 1873, this view was accepted, and consequently the 

 whole of the eastern portion of the Southern Alps was so coloured. How- 

 ever, since then the director himself, as well as the officers of the Geological 

 Survey, have visited and revisited that portion of the colony with the 

 result that the experience gained in New South Wales has been put aside or 

 ignored, and that beds not only having the same lithological character, but 

 situated in the same horizon, have now been divided solely according to 

 their fossil contents, thus creating such an utter confusion that it will take 

 years of hard work to put matters right again. 



Thus instead of the eastern sides of the Southern Alps forming one 

 wing of the great anticlinal, a synclinal arrangement has been given to the 

 series of beds, a broad zone of mesozoic rocks formhig the central portion 

 lying between Mount Torlesse and Mount Hutt on the one side and the 

 higher portion of the central chain on the other side which have been put 

 down as palaeozoic, thus reversing the facts, which examination in the field 

 and experience elsewhere have taught us to be correct. 



It would be quite impossible to pass in review the whole of the publica- 

 tions of the Geological Survey upon which these conclusions have been 

 based ; but a few observations in further explanation of the points at issue 

 may not be amiss. Since the Clent Hills plant beds were discovered by me, 

 further localities have been found at Mount Harper, in the Malvern Hills 

 on both sides of the Selwyn, in the Taylor Stream, in the Mount Hutt 

 Bange, in the high Mount Somers Eange, near the foot of the high ranges 

 east of Lake Coleridge, near the Coleridge Pass, and some few other locali- 

 ties. In fact they generally appear where great denudation has taken 

 place, and thus the lowest strata of the formation under review have be- 

 come exposed ; but now for a number of years this unmistakable position 

 has invariably been explained by the officers of the Geological Survey, by 

 their assertion that these plant beds were lying either above or against the 

 strata containing the marine shell beds, or they simply denied the facts, 

 against all evidence brought forward.* 



* See amongst other instances Geological Survey Eeports, 1879-80, p. 106. 



