president's address. 
639 
Generally speaking, Professor Ettingshausen's theories amount 
to this, that in Tertiary times, or earlier, there was a universal 
flora of mixed types, which later on, through the influence of 
floral climates, became sorted out, so that at the present day 
distinct regions present distinct peculiarities which at first did not 
exist. 
That the Australian region has now a flora of its own more 
marked and peculiar than perhaps that of any other region of the 
earth's surface will be disputed by none. At first sight this 
circumstance seems to have a parallel in the existence of types of 
land mammals, stragglers only of which are to be found elsewhere, 
and this view is apparently strengthened by the fact that in past 
ages monotremata and marsupials lived in Europe, while, 
according to Unger, Heer, Ettingshausen, and a few others, 
Australian types of plants, Eucalypts, Proteacese, Casuarinese, and 
many others also flourished. 
The subject is one well worth careful investigation. 
The monotremata we know first made their appearance in the 
Northern Hemisphere in the Triassic Age, and marsupials of low 
t} T pe are first found in the beds of the Oolitic (Jurassic) Series. 
In the rest of the Mesozoic series no animals of higher develop- 
ment than marsupials have been discovered, but no sooner do 
we reach the Eocene than it is evident that an enormous 
advance has been made, for we find ourselves surrounded 
with animals of much higher type, including the reputed 
ancestors of the horse, deer, antelope, squirrel, hedgehog, 
bear and others. Many remarkable animals existed also of 
types that have long died out. Searching upwards through the 
Oligocene, Miocene, and Pliocene, and continuing into the 
Pleistocene we find, as the meaning of those names implies, more 
and more resemblance to the animals now living outside the Austra- 
lian region, while at the same time we still keep sight of a few 
marsupials having affinities to the American opossum. This 
progression of types is utterly wanting so far as has been 
discovered in Australian strata, and it is only in the Pliocene beds 
that we first come upon undoubted proof of the existence of 
