Notes on the discovery of a new fossil fruit from the deep-lead tin drifts at Derby, Tasmania

On my last visit to the Briseis Mine workings, at Derby, the mining manager, Mr. Lindesay Clark, kindly guided me over the various alluvial tin-bearing sections now being sluiced by powerful hydraulic force. The formation in which the fine alluvial occurs at successive levels consists of white clayey sediments of an ancient lake-like river-course, generally overlaid by a thick layer of olivine-basalt. Among the successive alluvial tin-bearing layers of the 60 to 70 feet of clays, underlying the basalt, lenticular patches of lignite frequently occur, where, as in the ligneous clays of the auriferous deep-leads of Beaconsfield, they are associated with fossil leaves, twigs, and fruits, now regarded by me as of Eocene age, and contemporaneous with the fossil vegetable remains found abundantly intermixed with the marine fossils of the Eocene age at Table Cape.