Page:Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, vol. 35.djvu/28

2 different system which promised to be not entirely barren of results. Being required to visit constantly the gold-fields in all parts of North Gippsland east of the Mitchell River, I believed that by varying the route from place to place as much as possible, and by making use of those routes as lines of investigation, I might in course of time cover the whole district with, as it were, a network of traverses on which illustrative sections might be constructed.

This I have done so far as was possible to me; and wherever I found points of interest requiring further illustration, I have worked out those special localities with more detail. A long-continued series of aneroid readings has furnished me with the means of working out the sections with some degree of certainty. Finally, on the data thus obtained, I have constructed three main sections approximately across the general strike of the older sedimentary strata, and three other sections approximately at right angles to the former.

Where feature-surveys were available I have used them; but where, as unfortunately was too often the case, there were none, I have made such traverses with the compass, estimating the distance by the watch or by pacing, as would furnish me with fairly reliable data.

The knowledge which I have gained of the geology of the district has therefore resulted from actual inspection in the field; and it will be for geologists to say whether my interpretation of facts and the inferences which I have drawn therefrom are well grounded or not.

In these notes I propose to summarize the general results at which I have arrived. The details are partly contained in the 'Reports of Progress of the Geological Survey of Victoria,' and partly in papers which are now in process of completion.

The sketch sections given in this paper do not pretend to represent the exact features of any one locality; but I have endeavoured to portray in them, in a condensed form, that which I have observed in the field, and at the same time to do so in accordance with the results shown by the sections I have referred to.

The encouraging assistance of friends has not been wanting. I am under great obligations to Professor M'Coy, of Melbourne University, for examining the collections of fossils which I have made and for indicating their geological age; to Mr. C. H. P. Ulrich, F.G.S., of the Industrial and Technological Museum, Melbourne, who has most kindly aided me by examining collections of rocks in comparison with those of the Technological Museum in Melbourne; and to Mr. E. Brough Smyth, P.G.S., the Secretary for Mines, &c, under whose direction the Geological Survey of this Colony has been resumed, for every assistance which a long-standing friendship and a warm interest in the geological examination of the Colony could suggest. It was in consequence of a suggestion made by my friend Mr. B. Brough Smyth some years ago that I determined to attempt systematically the geological examination of North Gippsland.