New South Wales. 
53 
Tho Diprotodon appears not to have been limited to any one 
portion of Eastern Australia, for its remains have been found in. 
South Australia and Queensland as far north as the York Penin¬ 
sula. 
In many of the “ gold leads ” also, fragments of bones are 
found. A section of one sample, at Wattle Elat, above the Turon 
ltiver, is given in iriy paper on “ Fossil Bones ” (Q.J.O., 8. xi. 
]). 405, 1855), and in Anniversary Address to Royal Society, 
N.S.AY., 1873, p. 14” 
In many parts of the existing region, all over the surface, 
wherever the basal rock is not denuded, as near Sydney, there are 
local deposits which might be called “till,” were any Testacea 
found in them; and in the Interior there are widely spread 
accumulations of drift pebbles, which, as on the Hunter and 
AVollondilly, are rounded by attrition in their long journey from 
the mountains whence they have been derived. Sometimes, also, 
the breaking up of conglomerates has contributed to this drift. 
On Peak Downs there are deep accumulations of drift, such 
as transmuted beds of the Carboniferous formation, igneous rocks, 
such as porphyry and basalt, and fragments of the older Palaeozoic 
formation. Many of these are encrusted with thin calcareous 
cement, which forms cups of clear calc-spar in hollows of a fine 
porphyritie grit; the same grit occurring on the AYarrego, on the 
Ballandoon and Narran ridges, with transmuted quartzite, also in 
wells there and on the Darling near Fort Bourke, in which drift 
fine gold was detected by me to exist on the Downs, and has 
been again reported to me from tho base of Rankin’s Ranges on 
the Darling River,—the furthest known western auriferous 
locality in New* South AYales. 
In 1SG9 I reported the discovery of the femur of a bird at 
the depth of 1S8 feet, in drift resting on granite, from a well in 
that part of Peak Downs (22° 40' S.) which lies between Lord’s 
Table mountain and the head of Theresa Creek, near the track 
from Clermont to Broad Sound. Compared with the bones of 
Dinornis in the Australian Museum, both the Curator of that 
Institution, and myself came to the same conclusion as to its 
genus, and accordingly it was reported in the Geological Magazine, 
as Dinornis. Professor Owen has, however, removed it into 
another genus Dromornis considering it to have belonged to a 
Struthioid bird. If it was such, of course (especially after tho 
deep soundings between Australia and New Zealand, established 
by 1I.M.S. “Challenger” in 1874) the speculations I indulged 
on a possible former connection between those countries as 
illustrated by such a discovery are worth little. But if it was a 
Dromornis , then it falls in with the relationship to a present bird, 
tho Emu, just as the Kangaroos of this epoch are related in 
structure to the gigantic Marsupials of a past age. But Mr. 
