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PROCEEDINGS OF THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



[Mar. 20, 



India consists in the occurrence in both of the gemis Peco_pter!s, 

 Sphenopteris, Olossopteris, Phyllotheca, and Vertebraria ; a leaf which 

 is figured in Strzelecki's ' Physical Description of New South Wales ' 

 under the name of Zeugophyllites ; and a large seed or seed-vessel, of 

 which there is an Australian specimen in the British Museum. In 

 regard to the genus Olossopteris, the resemblance between some of 

 the specimens from India and others from Australia is so close as to 

 lead to the belief that the species are either nearly allied or identi- 

 cal. The same may be said of the genus Vertebraria*, the leaf, and 

 the seed or seed-vessel above referred to ; while there is a general 

 similarity of form in Pecopteris, Sphenopteris, and Phyllotheca. At first 

 sight the vegetable remains which I have enumerated might be 

 regarded as palaeozoic, seeing they are found in strata which in 

 Australia are said to alternate with beds containing Mollusks of a 

 Carboniferous or even Devonian aspect ; but as the localities where 

 these shells occur are far from affording a complete series of forma- 

 tions for comparison with those of other countries, their precise age 

 cannot in the mean time be ascertained. The southern hemisphere 

 seems to be the only part of the world in which we meet with such 

 a combination of plants and quasi- carboniferous or quasi-devonian 

 shells ; and since in other districts plants similar to most of them 

 are common, along with animal remains that are evidently not pa- 

 leozoic, we are reduced to the necessity of supposing either that shells 

 apparently palaeozoic survived in Australia to mesozoic times, or 

 that plants which in other places flourished at a comparatively late 

 period were introduced on the stage of being there at an earlier 

 epoch. Perhaps it will be found that the Mollusks and Plants at 

 our antipodes met each other half-way ; for while there is a great re- 

 semblance in the floras of the Indian and Australian geological fields 

 which we have been comparing, and while, on the whole, they ex- 

 hibit a Lower Jurassic fades, yet some plants that are most charac- 

 teristic of the Jura formation are wanting in New South Wales, 

 though frequent in India — I refer to Tceniopteris and Zamites. But 

 this is mere conjecture. It must be confessed that the whole sub- 

 ject of these fossils from the Newcastle and Hawkesbury basins is in- 

 volved in obscurity. Still that obscurity, resting on isolated spots 

 with a very limited succession of rocks, ought not to prevent us from 

 receiving light from other parts of the world, where the stratigram 

 phieal series is much better developed, and the relations of its various 

 members indisputably fixed. 



(2.) Fossils of the Indian Plant-bearing Sandstones and Coal- 

 fields. — To the consideration of these better-known localities let us 

 now proceed. 



A. Plant-remains. — Among our Indian plants a very marked 

 feature is the abundance of simple-fronded Perns. This of itself, as 

 it appears to me, would favour the supposition that the rocks in 

 which they occur are of Jurassic age, as it is in strata of that period 

 that simple-fronded Ferns are most numerous in Europe. But the 

 inference becomes still more probable when we advert to the parti- 

 * See the remarks on Vertebraria in the preceding paper, supra p. 339. — Edit. 



