General Remarks. 135 



12° 30', is in general mountainous and abrupt; and Captain 

 King's specimens from the north-east coast, show that granite 

 is found in so many places along this line, as to make it pro- 

 bable that primitive rocks may form the general basis of the 

 country in that quarter ; since a lofty chain of mountains is 

 continued on the south of Cape Tribulation, not far from the 

 shore, throughout a space of more than five hundred miles. 

 It would carry this hypothesis too far, to infer that these pri- 

 mitive ranges are connected with the mountains on the west 

 of the English settlements near Port Jackson, &c, where Mr. 

 Scott has described the coal-measures as occupying the coast 

 from Port Stevens, about lat. 33° to Cape Howe, lat. 37°, and 

 as succeeded, on the eastern ascent of the Blue Mountains, by 

 sand-stone, and this again by primitive strata*: — But it may 

 be noticed, that Wilson's Promontory, the most southern point 

 of New South Wales, and the principal islands in Bass's Straits, 

 contain granite ; and that primitive rocks occur extensively in 

 Van Diemen's Land. 



The uniformity of the coast lines is remarkable also in some 

 other quarters of Australia ; and their direction, as well as that 

 of the principal openings, has a general tendency to a course 

 from the west of south to the east of north. This, for exam- 

 ple, is the general range of the south-east coast, from Cape 

 Howe, about lat. 37°, to Cape Byron, lat. 29°, or even to 

 Sandy Cape, lat. 25° ; and of the western coast, from the south 

 of the islands which enclose Shark's Bay, lat. 26°, to North- 

 west Cape, about lat. 22°.— From Cape Hamelin, lat. 34° 12', 

 to Cape Naturaliste, lat. 33° 26', the coast runs nearly on the 

 meridian. The two great fissures of the south coast, Spencer's, 

 and St. Vincent's Gulfs, as well as the great northern chasm of 

 the Gulf of Carpentaria, have a corresponding direction ; and 

 Captain Flinders (Chart 4.) represents a high ridge of rocky 

 and barren mountains, on the east of Spencer's Gulf, as con- 

 tinued, nearly from north to south, through a space of more 

 than one hundred geographical miles, between latitude 32° 7' 

 and 34°. — Mount Brown, one of the summits of this ridge, 

 about latitude 32° 30', being visible at the distance of twenty 

 leagues. 



The tendency of all this evidence is somewhat in favour of 

 a general parallelism in the range of the strata, — and perhaps 

 of the existence of primary ranges of mountains on the east of 

 Australia in general, from the coast about Cape Weymouth f 



to 



* Annals of Philosophy, June 1824. 



f The possible correspondence of the great Australian Bight, the coast 

 of which in general is of no great elevation, with the deeply-indented Gulf 

 of Carpentaria, — tending, as it were, to a division of this great island into 



two. 



