president's address. 
645 
Judging from these facts, there is little doubt that in Permo- 
Carboniferous times an isolated Austral region of vast extent 
existed. 
The disco very just referred to can be best described by quoting 
from a Note in " Nature," Yol. lil, p. 523 ; and its importance 
is expressed in an extract from a letter of Mr. W. T. Blandford 
to the same journal, Yol. lil, p. 595 : — " The latest number of 
the Records of the Geological Survey of India contains a trans- 
lation of a paper by Dr. F. Kurtz on the Lower Gondwana beds 
of Argentina (from Revista del Mus. de la Plata). In this is 
recorded an important discovery of plant remains in shales at 
Bajo de Yelis. These fossils are well preserved, and while being 
quite different from the Argentine plant-remains already found, 
show a close affinity to the plants of the Kaharbari beds of the 
Lower Gondwanas of India, as well as to those of the Ekka- 
Kimberley beds of South Africa, the Newcastle and Bacchus-Marsh 
beds of Australia and the Mersey beds of Tasmania. The 
previously known plant-bearing beds of Argentina consisted of 
two series — one containing a Rhaetic flora, resembling that of 
the Stormberg (Upper Karoo) beds of South Africa, the Hawkes- 
bury beds of Australia, and the Rajmahal (Upper Gondwana) 
series of India; the other containing a flora of Lower Carboni- 
ferous character. The newly discovered flora must be intermediate 
in age between those two — that is to say, it cannot be older than 
Upper Carboniferous, nor younger than Triassic ; and with it 
must go the flora of the important coal-bearing Upper Gondwana 
beds of India. These have already been assigned to the Upper 
Carboniferous (at lowest) by Messrs. Medlicott and Blandford, 
and the Indian Survey, and the new discoveries in Argentina give 
a satisfactory confirmation of their views." 
Writing on this discovery Mr. W. T. Blandford says (see "Nature," 
Lil, p. 595) : — "It is difficult to understand how two floras, differ- 
ing from each other far more widely than do any two con- 
tinental floras living on the earth's surface at the present day, 
can have co-existed, unless there was for a long period of geological 
time a great southern continent — the Gondwana-land of Suess — 
