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THE GEOLOGIST. 



COLONIAL GEOLOGY. 



LEAYES FROM MY AUSTRALIAN NOTEBOOK. 



BY THOMAS HABBISON, OF MELBOURNE. 

 NO. II. THE EOCENE BEDS OF SCHNAPPER POINT. 



To my mind, the very prettiest of Victorian watering-places is that 

 known as above. It is so, not from brick-and-niortar embellishments, but 

 because still left as made by nature. Nothing can be more striking than 

 the contrast which this quietest of all quiet spots presents to the hurry 

 and bustle incidental to the Victorian metropolis. Reaching the pier, a 

 quaint-looking structure admirably matching the scenery around, one 

 seems to have actually gone backwards twenty or thirty years in Australian 

 history, and to be gazing on a scene such as Melbourne itself may have 

 presented ere gold discoveries had revolutionized the colonies. 



Even when regarded from the steamer, miles away, the view is especially 

 prepossessing. Not distinguished by any very grand features ; the hills 

 swelling into gentle heights, thickly timbered and dotted at intervals with 

 villa residences peeping from out lawn-like clearings ; the cliffs of diverse 

 colours, as formed by the wearing away of granitic or sandstone tongues 

 of land ; and the numerous little coves and miniature inlets, of which the 

 doubling every fresh headland gives some novel view, form a bit of scenery 

 half-countrified, half-maritime, as especially pleasing to the Australian, as 

 are Heme Bay, Margate, or the Isle of Wight, to the London cockney. 



Geologically, the district to be noticed forms a sort of irregularly- 

 shaped basin, bounded on the north and south by the granitic masses of 

 Mounts Martha and Eliza, on the east by a considerable patch of Silurian 

 rocks, and on the west by the land-locked bay of Port Phillip ; the whole 

 having been filled up with Tertiary strata, of which the surface-rock is 

 probably of the Pliocene period. 



Two miles northerly from the pier, and at the foot of a spur running 

 from Mount Eliza, a small bed of Carboniferous shales are plainly visible 

 at low water. These contain fragments of plants peculiar to the Victorian 

 Carboniferous period, which appears to have been not earlier than the 

 Oolitic era. The situation of this small outlier gives the beds some little 

 interest. Most of the Victorian coal-bearing rocks occupy a district form- 

 ing a broad stripe some thirty miles wide, and extending from near Cape 

 Otway to Gipps Land. Carboniferous strata crop out extensively around 

 Geelong, and are known to exist, as underlying beds, over the whole 

 peninsula of Bellarine (a district marked on the map by diagonal lines 

 alternately dotted and black, and sloping towards the right) ; whilst the 

 same strata, commencing on the eastern shores of Western Port, form the 

 coal district of Cape Patterson, and run, with but few breaks, under the 

 principal part of South Gipps Land. The question, therefore, naturally 

 arises, as to whether the strata of Schnapper Point and Bellarine were not 

 once continuous? If so, unless formed by denuding agencies, Port Phillip 

 Bay must be the result of a fault of depression, caused, it may be, by the 

 chasm left on the vomitting forth of vast quantities of basalt over the whole 

 of south-western Victoria during the Tertiary period. 



As bearing in some degree upon this subject, the sinking of the district, 

 I may notice that the aborigines speak of a time when the river Yarra 



