Page:Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, vol. 25.djvu/398

302 PROCEEDINGS OF THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY. [May 26, of chertified clay-ironstone and quartzite may be seen at their point of contact.

McCoy alleges the existence of cretaceous rocks about the upper part of the Flinders, not far from the western part of the base of the peninsula, which is interesting in connexion with their possible presence on the same side of the eastern backbone at its southern end near Melbourne and the great Australian bight, and also in Western Australia, doubtless in relation to that coast-range. No grooving or scratching of rocks, boulder-deposts, or other evidence of glacial action has anywhere been observed along this north-east coast, or at the pointed northern extremity of the Cape-York peninsula.

Thus Eastern Australia has its Posttertiary as well as its Tertiary, Secondary, Palaeozoic, and Azoic formations, in addition to the ordinary igneous basis on which they rest; and their presence tends to confirm the opinion expressed by the Rev. W. B. Clarke as to the parallelism and agreement (with a few exceptions, which perhaps future discovery will remove) between these systems of the Australasian province (in which he includes Australia proper, with the islands of Tasmania to the southward, New Zealand to the southeast, New Caledonia to the east, and Papua to the northward) and those of its antipodes, and to show that it is highly probable that the same geological formations exist here as in Europe, and that the same great laws were concerned in developing them. Little more can be done than to make dubious conjectures as to the geology of Papua; for even its coast remains unexplored, and our knowledge, if it may be so called, is merely subjective and based chiefly on evidence derived from stray facts and comparison of its physical features with those of other, and particularly neighbouring, islands.

Though a non-volcanic country, with one trivial exception (Mount Wingen, in the Liverpool range, 120 miles north from Sydney), Australia is occasionally subject to earthquake-shocks or earth waves, doubtless propagated from neighbouring true volcanic centres, e. g. New Zealand to the south-east and New Caledonia and the islands of the Indian Archipelago to the east and north, and sometimes perhaps from more distant regions. A slight shock was evident at Cape York in March, 1865, and a stronger one during December, 1866. Equally interesting is the evidence that the north-east, if not the whole of the east coast of Australia, is slowly rising, to be found in the gradual shoaling of the channel between Hinchinbrook Island and the mainland (lat. 18-1/2° S.), which is due, to all appearance, neither to silting up nor to the growth of coral — in the presence of water-worn caves in the sandstone cliffs of Albany island and those of the mainland opposite, now well above high-water mark — and in the existence along many parts of the coast, especially towards the northern end of the peninsula, of extensive tracts of level country now covered with sand-dunes bearing a scanty vegetation stretching inland and on either side to the base of lofty hills now ten, fifteen, or twenty miles off, but which had once closely bordered the sea, the whole looking as if they had once been under water. Corroborative evidence of this will