8 
INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 
to the Great Barrier Beef, Papua would be annexed, and even the 
Arafura Sea and Island of Timor might have been brought within the 
limits of Terra Australis. 
VEGETATION OF AUSTRALASIA. 
The mountain ranges of the east coast would be connected with 
those of Papua, and form a magnificent series of summits of 10,000 feet 
elevation, a configuration that must have arrested the moisture from the 
Pacific Ocean, and resulted in a moist tropical climate, well calculated 
to support the luxuriant growth of the vegetation of the coal period 
so far as East Australia was affected, though it might also have had 
the effect of rendering the climate of Central and ,A\ r est Australia so 
dry as to render the land a desert during the continuance of this 
carbonaceous period. East Australia has thus, on its lower levels, 
accumulated stores of fuel for use in ages long subsequent. The 
luxuriant vegetation necessary to the production of coal was limited to 
the area east of the 140th meridian, except in a portion of South Aus- 
tralia, which seems to have been favoured by the overflow of some 
large rivers draining the western slopes of the Great Range, and had 
their outlet through Spencer’s Gulf. The vegetation of Australia at 
this period, however well adapted for the formation of coal deposits, 
was not such as in the present would he suitable for the maintenance 
of mammalian life, as it consisted of ferns, cyeads, palms, and pine 
trees, of which only the Araucaria Bidivilli has left a living representa- 
tive, and its silicified wood from the coal formation presents exactly 
the same structure as the tree now growing on the ranges. Aus- 
tralian geography underwent little change during the Mesozoic period, 
but at the commencement of the Cretaceous a general subsidence of 
the whole continent began. The coal deposits ceased, and a freshwater 
deposit known as the Rolling Downs formation accumulated, the con- 
stituents being soft shales, which in the earlier periods supported a 
growth of ferns and pine timber. The land continued to subside until 
the ocean invaded a largo portion of the lower lands, but only as a 
shallow sea, or possibly in the form of estuaries, as the freshwater 
vegetation appears intercalated with marine limestones containing 
Ammonites and other moJlusca of the Cretaceous epoch. 
THE CRETACEOUS PERIOD. 
The depression during the Cretaceous period must have been 
gradual and of long continuance. The ocean apparently first covered 
the land near the Great Australian Bight on the south, and Arnhem’s 
Land oil the north, as in each of these localities there are extensive 
deposits of thick bedded limestones, which may have continuity 
across the continent under cover of the ferruginous sandstones of the 
latter part of the epoch. On the east coast the ocean rose from 100 
feet to 200 feet above its present level in Queensland, as the margin of 
the cretaceous rocks is visible close to South Brisbane, and there is a 
