5 4 Sedimentary Formations 
Hood’s discovery of Crocodilian remains in New Zealand seems 
to establish in another way some possible connection long ago 
with distant regions. 
Crocodiles are yet common in Queensland. Tf the notion of a 
former connection of New Zealand with the latter region is 
rejected, we have a connection of another kind maintained bv 
some geologists, and Australia is considered as forming a relick of 
a great Continent that formerly united what are now Africa aud 
India with it. To this conclusion the existence of the plant 
deposits (discussed above) bears considerable testimony, and 
coupled with the wingless birds and crocodilian remains, an 
extension of the inference so as to include New Zealand is not 
unjustifiable. (See Mr. Blandford’s paper “ On the Plant¬ 
bearing Series of India, or the former existence of an Indo- 
Oceanic Continent,” read before the Geological Society of London, 
16th December, 1874.) Incidentally, that paper affords by its 
deductions, as to Permian times, an additional argument for the 
views I have expressed as to the epoch to which the Australian 
coal plants really belong being Paheozoic. 
Looking to the Colony of New South Wales, we find that in 
more than one instance the present river channels have deepened 
since the drift first began to crowd their banks. I have traced 
one of these drift streams, sometimes at great heights above the 
valleys, for more than SO miles. In other places I have found 
upon the surface, as Strzelecki did in other parts, minerals 
(especially ores of copper, tin, and lead) which were at a great 
distance from their sources; aud in two instances that rare 
mineral, Molybdate of lead, of which no habitat has ever been 
yet found ; and not more than a year ago a lump of Sulphuret of 
antimony, weighing three pounds, and exhibiting surface evidence 
of its being a drifted substance, was disinterred from the super¬ 
ficial ironstone gravel of an unfrequented place in the bush on 
one of the heights of the north shore of Port Jackson. 
In the great plains of the interior bones of various gigantic 
marsupials, fishes and reptiles, are found bedded in black muddy 
trappean soil ; and on Darling Downs, in Queensland, univalve 
and bivalve shells are found in some cases attached to the bones, 
or deposited over them in a regular series of layers, at intervals 
of several feet ; and of these shells some arc yet living in the 
water-holes of the creeks. These facts are generally known, but 
it was not till recently that the osseous relics have been found in 
different creeks throughout the whole of the slopes and plains at 
the base of the Cordillera in Eastern Australia; in Victoria, in 
South Australia, and in North Australia also. Of similar age are 
the accumulations of bones in caverns, as at "Wellington; at 
Borec ; near the head of the Colo River ; at Vosseba, on the 
