Displayed in the Fisherman's Bend Cutting. 171 



The silt continues above the shelly stratum for 6 — 12 feet. 

 It consists^ no doubt, of the fine mud brought down by the 

 old Yarra, and is almost as fresh, though more consolidated, 

 than that now to be dredged off Williamstown. On burnino^ 

 a small fragment by way of experiment, I found that it 

 formed a red and, I should judge, not very bad brick. No 

 bones of mammals have been detected. I looked very closely 

 for any fresh- water signs, but no Unio or Corbicula rewarded 

 my search. The whole was almost certainly estuarine in 

 formation, though the upper part of the silt was generally 

 devoid of animal remains of any kind. 



The junction plane of silt and sand is distinct. There is 

 no break in the conformity. The lower layers of the sand 

 contain next to no shells. At the east end of the excavation 

 the vertical section of the sand exhibits much cross-bedding, 

 due to play of currents, but I could see no trace of shells. 

 The sands here were bound together in places by a ferruginous 

 cement, and preserved a vertical face. At the west end, on 

 the contrary, the sands were very loose, and at about the 

 level of present low-water mark (or a foot below) a very 

 good example of an old beach is preserved in the form of a 

 narrow 4 — 6 in. band, crammed with remains of shells such 

 as one finds nowadays piled on the shore near low-water 

 mark at Sandridge. Dead shells most of them, some bored 

 by Naticas, while some few sand burrowers, as Solen, Fholas, 

 and Mesodesma, clearly lived on the spot. How far this 

 layer of shells extended along the canal I am unable to say, 

 as the sands of the side-slopes towards the west had, from 

 their incoherence, to be protected and covered by sheet-piling 

 and pitching, even on my first visit to the ground. The 

 west end of the canal is over 2 miles from the present shore 

 of Hobson's Bay along the river. 



Up to this shell-band, then, the sands are of marine origin, 

 brought up by currents probably from the cliffs of Brighton, 

 Cheltenham, &;c. At Cheltenham the bed of shells occurs 

 at a height of nearly 60 feet, and, as the cliffs were rising 

 to this elevation, the wear and tear must have been very 

 great. As the sand spread over the silt, a corresponding 

 immigration of Solens and other sand-inhabiting forms took 

 place. But the uppermost layers of sand have, I believe, not 

 been laid down by water, but been blown in from the shores 

 of Hobson's Bay. The process is, in fact, still going on where 

 unchecked by vegetation, and where the Sandridge people 

 have stripped the surface of fern it goes on with unpleasant 



