Page:Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, vol. 26.djvu/336

 but found they had already been sold, and I learnt that they were afterwards conveyed to Portugal.

In a paper read at the British Association Meeting at Cambridge, in 1862 (see Report of Transactions of Sections, p. 83), I gave an account of a series of secondary fossils which I had found displayed in a temporary museum at a Meeting of the Somersetshire Archaeological and Natural-History Society at Wellington. These had been collected and sent over to this country by Mr. Clifton, a good observer and naturalist in Western Australia. They were exhibited by W. A. Sanford, Esq., E.G.S., of Nynehead Court, who had resided in an official capacity in Western Australia, and they had been in his possession about six months. He informed me that they had been more than twelve months in reaching England, that he had previously seen and examined them in the colony, whilst in the hands of Mr. Clifton, and that he had remarked to him how much they appeared to resemble European forms. They had been in the possession of Mr. Clifton for several years : hence it appears that, although they had not been made known before my paper above referred to, they were really the earliest evidence obtained of the presence of Mesozoic beds on the Australian continent. The Rev. W. B. Clarke has alluded to some of the fossils of this series in papers in the Journal of the Geol. Soc. vol. xxiii. p. 8, and in a contribution to the American Journal of Science for May 1868.

The only addition that has been made to our knowledge of the Australian Secondary rocks and their fauna, since the above, has been the description, by Prof. M'Coy, of a portion of an Ichthyosaurus, which he has described under the name of I. australis, and which he supposes may be from the Lower Lias. The only account I have seen of this discovery is in the ' Illustrated Australian News' of Sept. 6, 1868, in which are figures of a portion of a head, with the eye well perserved, a part of a paddle, eight vertebrae, and fragments of three ribs. These remains were described by Prof. M'Coy, at a Meeting of the Australian Royal Society — though in the abstract of the paper no description of the locality, or sections of the strata from which it was obtained, are given. When perfect, the specimen, it is stated, must have been about 30 feet long, in which case it would have been nearly equal in size to our largest European species. It would be important to learn, from any associated fossils, whether this is a Liassic species, or if it comes from one of the members of the Oolitic series ; for up to this time I have seen no organic remains which indicate a Lower-Lias fauna in Australia, though, as I shall show that the Middle and Upper Lias are there represented, there appears to be no reason why the Lower Lias also should not be found.

Having given the above summary of our knowledge of the Mesozoic geology and palaeontology of Australia up to this time, I have now to offer more detailed evidence on these points ; and I shall demonstrate the existence of a Secondary fauna in Western Australia and in the Queensland colony, much larger than has hitherto been supposed.