ORIGINAL CORRESPONDENCE.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 88, 26 February 1862, Page 3

ORIGINAL CORRESPONDENCE.

COAL DEPOSITS. To the Editor of the Otago Daii.v Times. Sir, —The lecture delivered by Dr. Lindsay on geology has been somewhat like the " choke damp" to our coal expectations. The learned Doctor, judging from some specimens of lignite, declared that true coal had not yet been discovered in this Province, and inferred that it did not exist. This appears to me an error, arising from confounding the geological formation of tho eastern with the western coast, where truecoal has been fouud both on the Buller and Gray by Sir. Haast. Sir Roderick Slurchison, in a recent lecture, while noticing the age of the coal-fields in Australia, observes that while Professor Sl'Coy represents the coaly deposits of A rictoria to be of the oolitic or perassic age, the Rev. AY. B. Clarke declares them to be of the palaeozoic age, or reposing upon the true mountain limestone, in other words, time coal ; while Sir. Gould of Tasmania speaks decisively of the coal beds of the Stersey and the Don underlying beds containing true old carboniferous fossils ; remarking that these relations are so far unlike those which he observed on the eastern coast of the island where the coal ovarlic*.

The inference drawn by the learned geologist is this, and I think it may be applied to the case of New Zealand. Now as Australia is so vast a region, may not much of the coal within it be of the age assigned to it by Sir. Clarke, and yet may not Professor Sl'Coy be also right in assigning some of this mineral to the same politic age as the coal of Brora and "the Eastern moorlands of Yorkshire V

Stay not b.ith Dr. Lindsay and Sir. Haast be right in their respective opinions as far as the personal observation of each has gone 1 Slay not the " resinous shaje" found on the banks of the AVaitahuna be somewhat similar to the " important discovery of a resinous shale" by Sir. Gould of Tasmania, "termed dysodile, and wliich, like the torbaue mineral of Scotland, promises to be turned to great account in the production of paraffine." Coal.