On the Relative Positions of certain Plants in the Coal-Bearing Beds of Australia

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Abstract
In the “Observations on the Flora of the Oolite,” by Baron de Zigno, published in the Quarterly Journal of the Society, No. 62, there is a paragraph respecting the supposed non-verification of certain genera of plants in the Australian coal-fields, which were reported by me in 1847. It is only right that I should offer a few words of comment on. that paragraph. By reference to the same number of the Quarterly Journal (p. 147), it will be seen that Mr. Selwyn has already recognized in Eastern Victoria “true Carboniferous plants;” and he further states that “in Tasmania the coal-bearing beds rest quite conformably on and pass downwards into calcareous beds, the fossils from which are, I believe, nearly all Carboniferous or Devonian forms.” Now this is precisely the case in New South Wales, in which colony the plants said to be Jurassic occur (coal-cliffs, Mulubimba, near Newcastle, mouth of Hunter River) in the same beds and blocks with heterocercal Fishes, one of which is figured by Dana as Urosthenes australis , and was acknowledged by Agassiz to be a palæozoic fish. In other portions of New South “Wales, and in the new colony of Queensland, in close connexion with calcareous beds holding abundance of “Carboniferous and Devonian” zoological forms, occur shales and fine calcareous grits charged with the plants which I reported in 1847, and which Baron de Zigno does not find verified by Messrs. Morris and McCoy.

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