GEOLOGY OF NORTH GIPPSLAND, VICTORIA. 33 
are found here, also other vegetable impressions not sufficiently 
distinct to be determined.” He adds that these plant-beds are 
underlain by a great thickness of purple-red rubbly and nodular 
shales, interstratified with purple-red and claret-coloured sandstones. 
Professor M'Coy, in his essay on the Paleontology of Victoria 
(Exhibition Essays, 1866), says that the sandstones of the Avon were 
the only trace of the Carboniferous formation which he could recog- 
nize in Victoria, and the only fossil from them, the Lepidodendron, 
identical with that recognized by him many years before from New 
South Wales and Queensland; and further, in the ‘ Prodromus of 
the Paleontology of Victoria,’ Decade I., he figures and describes this 
among the Paleozoic coal-plants (Carboniferous series) as Lepido- 
dendron australe, M‘Coy. 
Up to the present time opportunity has been wanting to enable 
me to visit the Avon country and make a personal examination. 
As I have already pointed out, the Avon Sandstones do not extend 
at any rate to the eastward of Maximilian Creek, and thus the 
bounds have been narrowed down within which the correlation of 
the Lepidodendron-beds of the Avon with the Archwopteris-beds of 
Iguana Creek is to be sought. Present information leads me to 
suspect that the passage may be gradual and undefined. 
Ill. Tertrary. 
Passing upwards from the rocks of the last-described period, there 
is an immense break in the geological series ; the missing part of the 
record seems so completely lost that there are no means, so far as 
my present knowledge goes, to enable us even to suspect where any 
portions of it ever existed in the district I describe. 
In looking at the sketch section, fig. 1 (p. 6), it will be seen at 
onee that the Paleozoic rocks form a great mass of mountainous 
eountry fringed on the north and south by Tertiary deposits ; the 
former those of the “‘ Murray basin,” the latter marine. Whether 
the Mesozoic Coal-measures of South Gippsland extended over the 
northern part of the district, in the same way that we see the Upper 
Paleozoic groups did, is not known. ‘There are at present no data ; 
but, so far as I can judge, it seems to me very doubtful. 
4. Miocene. 
(h) Bairnsdale Limestone.—The oldest of the Tertiary formations 
in North Gippsland is the Bairnsdale Limestone, collections of fossils 
from which have been referred by Professor M‘Coy to the Middle 
Miocene period *; it is of the age of similar marine limestones of 
Corio Bay and other localities in Victoria. It is a coarse shelly 
limestone, which varies locally in texture, being in some places 
without apparent stratification for considerable thicknesses. Nume- 
rous remains of species of Cypreea, Ostrea, Pecten, and Brachiopoda are 
frequent, together with a large echinoid, probably a Clypeaster. It 
shows itself in the river-valleys of the Mitchell, the Nicholson, and the 
* Geological Survey of Victoria, No. 2. p. 72. 
QJ. G.8. No. 137. D 
