1879.] 
President's Address. 
45 
If this case stood alone, taking into consideration the great difficulty 
of surveying in the neighbourhood of Sironcha, on account of the very im¬ 
perfect manner in which the rocks are exposed, and the prevalence of forest, 
it would be reasonable to doubt Mr Hughes’s conclusions, the more so as 
Mr. King, who also examined the ground, and who at first thoroughly 
endorsed them, has since expressed some slight doubts, although these doubts 
appear due rather to Paleontological than to Geological considerations; 
but somewhat similar contradictions in homotaxis occur amongst the fossil 
plants of several Gondwana groups. The collections which have accumulat¬ 
ed in the course of the last 25 years are now being examined and described 
by Dr. Feistmantel, who has already published accounts of most of those 
found in the upper Gondwana beds. One fasciculus of the “ Palseontologia 
Indica,” containing the plants of the Jabalpur group, appeared during the 
past year, and the flora was shewn to be closely allied to that found in 
middle jurassic (lower oolitic) beds in Europe. But some of the same 
plants have also been found in the Maledi beds associated with the triassic 
fish and reptiles. Other plants from the Maledi beds, it is true, indicate a 
lower horizon, but still one superior to the trias. Again, in Cutch, some of 
the Jabalpur plants recur together with others, all allied, like those of 
Jabalpur, to middle jurassic types in Europe ; yet the plant beds overlie 
marine rocks abounding in upper jurassic mollusca. Last of all, the Indian 
coal measures or Damuda series, which are of lower Gondwana age, contain 
a flora considered by several botanists to be jurassic, but lately classed by 
Dr. Eeistmantel as triassic. This flora, however, is most closely allied to 
one occurring in Australia in beds associated with others containing marine 
carboniferous fossils. 
It may, I think, safely be inferred from these anomalies in the distri¬ 
bution of ancient terrestrial and fiu’viatile organisms in India, that such types 
did not exist at the same epoch as their nearest allies, often not to be distin¬ 
guished in the fossil state, in other countries, and that the succession of life 
on land was less uniform than in the ocean. The fact that land regions at 
the present day, under the same parallels of latitude and enjoying the same 
climate, are distinguished by far more striking differences in their fauna 
and flora than marine provinces are, and that in some land regions, as in 
Australia, types have survived and even predominate, which in other parts 
of the earth’s surface appear to have died out at distant past epochs, is 
quite in accordance with this view. It follows as a corollary that land 
plants and animals cannot be accepted as evidence of geological age with 
the same confidence as marine forms can. 
It must not be supjjosed that the opinions just exjn’essed are generally 
accepted. They are disputed by Dr. Feistmantel himself and by other 
