64 
The Upper Marine beds are followed by a scries of coal beds and 
other fresh-water deposits, containing in great abundance plant fossils, 
especially Thyllotheca, Vertebrarici, Glossopteris , Gangamopteris, and others, 
and also TIrostJienes, a heterocercal fish. 
The age of these beds can be easily guessed ; they lie above marine 
beds of I pper Carboniferous age, and consequently most naturally represent 
the close of the Palaeozoic Epoch, or they can be considered as approximately 
the representatives of the Permian. 
During the period of the Marine beds (Lower and Upper) in Australia 
there appears also a change of climatic conditions to have taken place, for, 
as mentioned before, Mr. 11. D. Oldham has observed there certain con- 
glomeratic deposits, which showed signs of glacial action during their 
deposition. Perhaps the beginning of these climatic changes caused also a 
change in the flora of those Carboniferous times, because a Lower Carboni- 
ferous flora is hereafter, still in Carboniferous beds, followed by a flora of a 
Mesozoic habit, when compared with European relations. This glacial 
character of the mentioned beds will serve us further for correlation of these 
beds with others, where also similar deposits were observed. We have there- 
fore here, within the Carboniferous Period in New South Wales, the 
beginning of a Mesozoic Flora, which, in the Newcastle beds (Permian ?), is 
still more numerously developed. 
(4.) In Victoria the relations are somewhat different; there are no 
Marine beds above the Avon Sandstones which would represent the Marine 
beds in New South Wales, but there is the Bacchus Marsh Series, consisting 
of lower conglomeratic beds, and higher beds with plant fossils. 
The lower, or conglomeratic beds, have for some time past been con- 
sidered as having been brought together by the action of floating ice. I have 
originally compared them with similar beds in the Hawkcsbury rocks of New 
South Wales, but recently it has been shown that they must be correlated 
with the mentioned beds, showing signs of glacial action, in the Marine beds 
of New South Wales, and thus they represent, in time, the end of the Car- 
boniferous Epoch ; while the strata above them, containing leaves of the 
genus Gangamopteris, M‘Coy, are to be correlated with the Newcastle Coal 
Measures in New South Wales, and are therefore of about the same age. ‘ 
