﻿1861.] 



CLARKE — COAL-FORMATION OF AUSTRALIA. 



355 



there is a paragraph* respecting the supposed non- verification of 

 certain genera of plants in the Australian coal-fields, which were 

 reported by me in 1847. 



It is only right that I should offer a few words of comment on 

 that paragraph. 



By reference to the same number of the Quarterly Journal (p. 147), 

 it will be seen that Mr. Selwyn has already recognized in Eastern 

 Victoria " true Carboniferous plants ;" and he further states that 

 " in Tasmania the coal-bearing beds rest quite conformably on and 

 pass downwards into calcareous beds, the fossils from which are, I 

 believe, nearly all Carboniferous or Devonian forms." 



Now this is precisely the case in New South Wales, in which 

 colony the plants said to be Jurassic occur (coal-cliffs, Mulubimba, 

 near Newcastle, mouth of Hunter River) in the same beds and 

 blocks with heterocercal Fishes, one of which is figured by Dana f 

 as Urosthenes australis, and was acknowledged by Agassiz to be 

 a palaeozoic fish. 



In other portions of New South Wales, and in the new colony of 

 Queensland, in close connexion with calcareous beds holding abun- 

 dance of " Carboniferous and Devonian " zoological forms, occur 

 shales and fine calcareous grits charged with the plants which I 

 reported in 1847, and which Baron de Zigno does not find verified 

 by Messrs. Morris and McCoy. 



The latter gentleman examined and reported on the collections 

 which I forwarded to Professor Sedgwick, and which are now depo- 

 sited in the Woodwardian Museum at Cambridge ; but he did not 

 mention the fossils alluded to by De Zigno, because I did not, at that 

 time, include them in my collections for the university. Nor could 

 Professor Morris mention such in his account of the fossil flora 

 published in Strzelecki's work, because at that time none of the older 

 forms had been found by Count Strzelecki, and no one besides my- 

 self had made any discovery of such plants in Australia. But Mr. 

 Selwyn's paper referred to above is sufficient to verify the facts I 

 communicated, so far as concerns the particular genera to which Mr. 

 Selwyn alludes. Moreover, I placed years ago, in the Australian 

 Museum at Sj'dney, specimens of these disputed plants ; and in the 

 present year I saw one of them in the University Museum at Mel- 

 bourn, which had been found in Gipp's Land. 



Some years since I forwarded specimens to England, and one was 

 considered at the time, by Professor McCoy, to be a Lepidodendron 

 of the English coal-fields, so much did it resemble a well-known 



* " This would not be the case with those of Australia, if the observations 

 made in 1847 by the Rev. Mr. Clarke were confirmed ; for he mentions in these 

 deposits the presence of the genera Sigittaria, Lepidodendron, and Stigmaria, 

 which would settle the question. But I am not aware that the facts thus cited 

 have been since verified. On the contrary, no mention is made of these genera 

 in the works of Messrs. Morris and McCoy, in which we are presented with a 

 series of forms among which, together with local types analogous to those of 

 India, there are species which recall the Jurassic flora of Scarborough." (Vol. 

 xvi. p. 111.) 



t Geoiog. U. S. Soc Expi. Exp., pi. 1. fig. 1. 



