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[1].
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.
- ↑ The papers now in hand are "On the Devonian Rocks of North Gippsland" and "Section 1 of the Geological Structure of North Gippsland."
