GLACIAL CO^^DITIOXS IN THE PALEOZOIC EEA, ETC. 253 



be measured in yards. Mr. Oldham found fragments well smoothed 

 and striated as if by a glacier, and he is inclined to believe that the 

 fragments of rock were derived from icebergs. 



Nor are these boulder-beds confined to the locality mentioned 

 north of Sydney. Similar deposits are shown by Mr. Oldham to 

 occur at Wollongong to the south and in the Blue Mountains to 

 the west, and again far to the northward in Queensland. Mr. 

 Oldham also thinks, and I thoroughly agree with him, that the 

 Stony-Creek beds, and not the much later Hawkesbury, are the equi- 

 valents in time of the Bacchus-Marsh beds of Victoria. The evidence 

 of ice-action in the Hawkesbury beds is fully accepted by Mr. Oldham, 

 though not regarded as evidence of glaciation so extensive as that 

 which affected the underlying series *. 



Thus throughout Eastern Australia, from Queensland to Victoria, 

 there is found evidence of ice-transport in beds belongiDg to the 

 Carboniferous period. The Australian marine Carboniferous beds 

 have usually been considered of Mountain-Limestone age ; but I 

 learn from Dr. Waagen, who has made a special study of the Car- 

 boniferous fauna in connexion with his description of that found in 

 the Salt Eange of the Punjab, that the Australian marine Carbo- 

 niferous fossils are of somewhat later date, corresponding approxi- 

 mately to the Coal-measures of Western Europe and to the Fnsulina- 

 limestones and their associated beds in Kussia. 



It is very remarkable that, at the very time when Mr. Oldham was 

 engaged in obtaining evidence of glacial action in Carboniferous 

 times in Australia, Dr. AVaagen's attention was called to similar 

 evidence in Is^orthern India. The two lines of research were abso- 

 lutely independent of each other, neither writer being aware of the 

 other's studies, and therefore the circumstance that both, from widely 

 different data, come to the same conclusion as to the age of the Lower 

 Gondwanas is one of those extraordinary coincidences which rarely 

 occur except when a real scientific discovery is made. As already 

 mentioned, both papers appear in the same number of the Indian 

 Geological Survey Eecords. 



In the Salt Eange surveyed by Mr. Wynne and described by him 

 in the fourteenth volume of the Memoirs of the Geological Survey of 

 India, and in the continuation of the range to the westward beyond 

 the Indus, described by the same geologist in vol. xvii., boulder- 

 beds have been found in several places and are described in the 

 works mentioned. One of the most important occurrences is in the 

 eastern part of the range, near the Khewra salt-mines. Here the bed 

 consists of dark shales filled with large boulders of granite, syenite, 

 porphyrite, quartzite, and other hard rocks of unknown derivation. 

 Mr. Wynne, when he surveyed the Salt Ilange, had very little if any 

 acquaintance with the Lower Gondwana ; but Mr. Theobald, who had 

 a good knowledge of the Talchir beds, at once recognized the 



* In the Hawkesbury series angular boulders of shale, of a kind also inter- 

 bedded, are found in the sandstone. They occur of all sizes up to 20 feet in 

 diameter, with their stratification at all angles to the dip of the sandstone. 



