272 Geology of 



considerable hardness that I was unable, with the tools at my command, 

 to procure any characteristic specimens, but I have no doubt that they 

 are of saurian origin. JSo teeth were visible amongst this bone breccia. 

 Some of the bones appearing to have been much rolled, resemble the 

 vertebrae of Granocephalous reptiles of the carboniferous period ; as 

 for instance, those of Dentrorpeton, Hylonomus, &c. I fail to see 

 any resemblance between these vertebra} and those of Ichtyosaurus, to 

 which Dr. Hector has referred one of the vertebrae collected by me, in 

 his paper * " On the Fossil Reptiles of New Zealand," and upon the 

 strength of which he concludes the beds in question are of Triassic 

 age. 



The whole of these strata form a large anticlinal in Eossil Grully, 

 and they are well and clearly exposed in this deep and rocky gorge for 

 several miles. They contain the following genera, and probably 

 species : — Orthis spinigera, Spirifera (lineata, lata, oviformis, duodecimo- 

 costata), Producta, Athyris, Euomphalus, Murchisonia, Orthoceras, 

 Encrinites, of which many resemble, or are closely allied to, Australian 

 forms from the New South Wales coal-field series, f They are 

 covered by the same succession of beds as occur in the Clent Hills, 

 beginning with !No. 5, and I may here observe that I was able to trace 

 some of these upper beds, as, for instance, the chocolate-coloured 

 slates, all the way from near the summit of the Mount Potts range, to 

 the foot of Mount Potts, five miles to the south. 



This is therefore good and, as I think, conclusive evidence that the 

 Clent Hills and Malvern Hills plant beds, notwithstanding they 



* " On the Fossil Eeptiles of New Zealand," by James Hector, F.E.S. " Transactions New 

 Zealand Institute," Vol. VI, pages 334 and 336. 



t I have not the least doubt that in future years, both the shell and plant beds will here be found 

 iuterstratified with each other, as this has been the case in the coal-fields of New South Wales, and 

 consequently that also in New Zealand, it will be clearly proved that they cannot belong to such 

 distant periods as the carboniferous on the one hand, and the Jurassic on the other. Comparing 

 them with well-defined European formations, they may, like the rhaetic formation in the European 

 Alps be passage-beds, or represent the carbo-permian formation of the western portion of the 

 United States (North America), where it has also been impossible to separate these two formations, 

 which, in Europe, are so clearly and distinctly defined. When speaking further on of the Waipara 

 formation, a similar difficulty will be placed before us, as here also the remains of mezozoic saurians 

 and kainozoic shells are mixed with each other. Consequently, in this case, we have to deal with still 

 another passage formation uniting two well-defined European divisions. Thus, had the geological 

 nomenclature been based upon the strata of the Southern instead of the Northern Hemisphere, and the 

 whole had been divided into periods, we should doubtless have included saurians with the lower 

 tertiary division, and the definition of palaeozoic formB would have been much different from that 

 which has been obtained in European nomenclature. Stoliczka has shown also that the carbo-permian 

 cannot be separated from the lower trias in the Himalayas, as these beds are also closely connected 

 by passage-beds. 



