GEOLOGY OF NORTH GIPPSLAND, VICTORIA. 11 
yielding Upper Silurian fossils, have led to this belief. But too 
much weight may have been perhaps attached to this negative evi- 
dence. Ina group of strata at Tabberabbera, many of which are as 
indurated and slaty as any in the district, Middle Devonian fossils 
are met with*. 
I point out these doubts as to the propriety of considering all this 
area as Lower Silurian, or even Silurian; but provisionally I use 
these terms for description. 
The apparent paucity of fossils is probably due to the slight exa- 
mination which has yet been possible of an immense area of moun- 
tainous country, all of which is clothed with forest, and very much 
with dense and sometimes almost impenetrable scrubs. 
(6) Metamorphic Crystalline Schists—We find, occupying the 
central part of the Omeo plateau, and intimately connected with the 
last-mentioned strata, a great extent of crystalline schists. They 
may be defined as extending from the Dargo River to the Limestone 
River, in a direction east and west, and from the Fainting Range 
northward far beyond the limits of the district I am considering. 
They do not, however, occupy exclusively the whole of this tract 
of country. _Slaty and indurated rock masses, which I regard as 
Silurian, appear in places, as at Bindi, while other extensive areas 
are of granite, not belonging to the crystalline-schist series, and 
elsewhere are varieties of quartz-porphyries. At the Omeo Plains 
there is a wide extent of nodular argillaceous schists, which are 
connected with, but do not, as it seems to me, belong to the Omeo 
erystalline schists. 
These latter form a complete series of varieties of mica-schist and 
gneiss, with subordinate varieties of quartz-schist, the extreme end 
of the series being, on the one hand, a fine-textured, glistening mica- 
schist, as at Swift’s Creek, and, on the other, granitic gneiss or 
schistose granites, as, for instance, in the Dry-Hill Creek at Omeo. 
Many of these latter are, in hand specimens, undistinguishable from 
an ordinary ternary granite. 
The connexion of these crystalline schists with the Silurian is 
clearly shown in many places. I subjoin a sketch section (fig. 2), 
which, I believe, exhibits tolerably clearly the position of the Omeo 
schists in the geological series. Thesection has been sketched from 
one constructed to scale from notes which I have prepared to illus- 
trate a series of papers on the geological structure of North Gipps- 
land. 
In looking at the details of this section we see that the tilted and 
denuded Silurian strata appear from under the scarped edge of the 
Upper Paleozoic ‘‘Iguana-Creek beds.” They extend, as the section 
shows, across to the Dargo River, forming a mountainous country 
excavated into deep valleys and high steep ridges by the Wonan- 
* Professor M‘Coy, who kindly examined a collection from Tabberabbera, 
identifies the fossils as Spirifera levicostata of the Buchan Limestone and a 
Grammysia. See also the ‘Report of Progress of the Geological Survey of 
Victoria,’ No. IJ. Appendix to “ Notes on the Geology of part of the Mitchell- 
River Division” &c., p. 72. 
