306 Carboniferous Glaciation^ Etc. — White- 
S. f e • f Upper Ecca shale, 1,200 ft. -2, 700 ft. 
t« i l^-^ J Ecca conglomerate, 500 ft. -800 ft. 
8 fbqf^ 1 (Dwyka). (glacial). 
* [ [Lower Ecca shale, ft.-800ft.. 
^ Table Mountain and older formations. 
AUSTRALIA. 
New South Wales. — We now pass to the remaining 
one of the three continents lying about the Indian ocean. 
So far as known, we have here to do with three provinces, viz. 
New South Wales, Victoria, and Queensland ; and we shall 
consider them in the order named. From the time of the first 
description of the boulder beds of New South Wales by Dr. 
Thomas Oldham in 1861," to the present, the knowledge of 
these interesting formations has steadily increased, and in no 
region are palaeontogical or stratigraphical data more abund- 
ant. Dr. Oldham, in describing the carboniferous marine 
beds at Wollongong, remarks : "And still further, many of the 
lower beds of the Australian group, there so abundantly rich 
in fossils, are very similar to many of the beds in the Talchir 
series. There is the same mixture of pebbles and large rolled 
masses in a matrix of fine silt ; and much of this silt is 
of exactly the same peculiar bluish-green tint so characteristic 
of these beds in this country, and which when once seen can 
never be mistaken." Similar beds were observed in the upper 
marine coal measures (of W. B. Clarke) in the neighborhood 
of Branxton, by Mr. C. S. Wilkinson who reported finding a 
very coarse conglomerate containing large sub-angular boul- 
ders of rock foreign to the district, which he considered as 
erratic, though no ice-scratches were found. However, when 
in 1885, Mr. R. D. Oldham,* Deputy Superintendent of the 
geological survey of India, made a visit to Australia for the 
purpose of comparing its strata with those of India, he made 
the important discovery of the presence of boulders and 
pebbles unmistakably striated and polished by ice, not far 
from where the erratics were noticed by Wilkinson. " Blocks 
of slate, quartzite, and crystalline rocks, for the most part 
sub-angular, are, " he says,^ "scattered through a matrix of 
fine sand or shale and these latter beds contain delicate Fen- 
"Memoirs Geol. Surv. India, Vol. iii, p. 209. 
' R. D. Oldham. Memorandum on the correlation of the Indian and 
Australian coal bearing beds. Rec. Geol. Surv. India, xix, lb86> 
pp. 39-47. 
^Loc. cit., p. 44. 
