AUSTRALIA AND THE ANTARCTIC.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLVII, Issue 14508, 24 October 1910, Page 9

AUSTRALIA AND THE ANTARCTIC.

A " MISSING-LINK" QUEST.

The spirit ol Professor David will in a sense accompany the expedition now preparing for a dash to the South Pole under the leadership of Captain Scott, since no less than three of the geologists in the party are pupils of the adventurous professor. One of the trio of geologists whose faces are now set towards Antarctica is Mr. Griffith Taylor, a distinguished Sydney and Cambridge Universities scholar. In Sydney last week Mr. Taylor spoke interestingly of the mission he has amid the ice-packs and crevices of Antarctica. "A matter I intend giving special attention to at the South Pole/' said Mr. Taylor. 41 is one that is extraordinarily interesting, namely, the identity of the sequence of rocks in Antarctica, so far as they have been worked out, to those of South Australia. I was working especially on fossils from South Australia at Cambridge University, and it is a most extraordinary coincidence that during the last few mojiths the same sort of fossils have been found in the Antarctic rocks. It is a discovery of scientific moment. The fossils are Cambrian corals, and they have considerable biological interest because they eeem to form the missing link between two great biological families, the sponges and the nils. The work has turned out to be most import-ant, and investigating this further as a paleontologist will be one of my main objects at the South Pole. " It is certainly a quaint coincidence that these fossils which I found in the South Australian rocks should have been found by Professor David at the South Pole. It eo happens that I am the only man who has done any work on these South Australian fossils during the last 20 years, and it can be said without the risk of exaggeration that this resemblance between the Antarctic and South Australian rocks suggests possibilities of mineral finds at the South Pole, because the Broken Hill lodes are supposed to be associated with the rocks of this particular age. It is not yet quite worked out to demonstration, but. so far as the knowledge goes, Broken Hill country rock is reasonably supposed to be allied to that of Antarctica, As in South Australia, the basal rocks are gneiss, above them are red granites, over them are Cambrian limestones, and surrounding them again are the yellowish stones. The fossils are in the Cambrian limestones, and that is where the supposed missing link is. The inference is that at a not- very distant past the continents of Australia and Antarctica "weie united. It is a feature of modern geology that it is able to link up continents far distant by very similar strata graphical rocks or series of 'rocks, and this seems a very good example of it."