anniveesary address. 35 



Explorations in Queensland. 



Having been honoured by the confidence of the Grovernment 

 in relation to their endeavours to provide for the mineral explo- 

 ration of that Colony, I may mention, as I do with satisfaction, 

 that my friend Mr. Daintree, vs^hose name has often been by me 

 introduced to this Society, and vv^hose wreck in the " Queen of the 

 Thames" I have mentioned in a former part of this Address, has 

 been occupied in bringing before the British public the claims to 

 the notice of capitalists of that Colony of which he is now the 

 accredited representative. 



On his voyage home with a very large and well-assorted collec- 

 tion of the rocks, fossils, and minerals of Queensland, these, of 

 course, went to the bottom. But he lost no time in writing to 

 me and our friend, the late Professor Thomson, requesting us to 

 send him for the Exhibition such fossils as we possessed that 

 would serve his purpose. Such were despatched by each of us. 



He had made a sketch map of the Colony, which was supposed 

 to be lost also ; and as this was a desideratum in Queensland, an 

 application was made to me by one of the Ministers for a copy 

 of it. But as no copy was left with me, I promised, if time were 

 allowed, that so far as our personal knowledge went, a substitute 

 should be produced ; and by the aid of Mr. Norman Taylor, in 

 Melbourne, who saw more of it than Professor Thomson or myself 

 had seen, a blank map was coloured here, and one of the only 

 three copies in existence I have exhibited to-night, in order to 

 point out not only what is going on to the north of us, and what 

 unpaid geologists have been doing in this Colony, but for the 

 higher object of showing how very probable it is that, as copper 

 and tin are now bringing us into parallelism with Cornwall and 

 Devon, so Queensland offers in a large portion of her eastern area 

 similar geological resemblances. 



It is now considered that there is very little, if any, of the 

 Silurian formations in Queensland, and therefore all the slaty 

 country represented on the map is held to be of Devonian age. 

 The patches marked metamorphic may, however, be transmuted 



