214 — ON THE VEGETATION, ETC., 
columnar and always more or less cellular. In the ravines and on the 
coast, where the loose friable soil crumbles away rapidly, the strata 
are generally horizontal, but sometimes they are very tortuous. Such 
deviations from a straight line would at first sight appear to have been 
caused by voleanie action; but the strata being uninterrupted and 
seldom attenuated at the flexure, which must have been the case had 
they been bent to their present position, I think there can be little 
doubt that this phenomenon has been occasioned by the beds having 
been deposited on an uneven surface in still water, such as may be 
supposed to be now going on in the muddy creeks along the coast. 
The ranges of hills in the Manukan forest, which bound the plain 
on the west, and the headlands, and in the islands on the opposite 
coast, at the entrance of the Thames, the composition of the rocks is 
nearly the same, being chiefly conglomerate with greenstone, and other 
primitive rocks in a few places. Several metallic veins have been 
discovered, and two copper mines have been opened ; one on the Great 
Barrier Island, and the other in the island of Kuwau, where mining 
operations are carried on at present on a large scale. 
At the time the site of Auckland was fixed on for the capital of the 
colony, there were almost no inhabitants in the neighbourhood. Inde- 
pendent of what is known, however, of the history of the locality, the 
remains of pahs, and marks of cultivation chiefly on the scoria land, and 
the heaps of pepe-shells everywhere, show that the country was, at no 
distant period, highly cultivated and thickly peopled. 1t is now 
iwenty years since Shungee, on his return from Europe, armed his 
followers with the fire-arms he brought with him and could procure 
from whalers, and laid waste the country, destroying the inhabitants 
wherever he went. The escarpments on the slopes of the volcanic 
hills, and the ditches and ramparts that enclosed the pahs on the 
headlands along the shores, still remain as proofs of these places 
having been fortified, and the great quantities of human bones found 
in the caves and among the rocks attest the fate of the defenders. 
The general aspect of the country, covered with dingy fern (Pteris 
esculenta), the tea-tree (Leptospermum scoparium), relieved only here 
and there by flax bushes (Phormium tenaz), and the tufts of foliage on 
the stems of the cabbage-tree (Cordyline stricta), is not very encou- 
raging to a botanist. In going over the country, however, he will 
often come suddenly on the edge of a steep ravine, and be agreeably - 
surprised to find its sides covered with most luxuriant vegetation, and 
