200 Transactions. — Geology. 



traces of their handiwork at Easter Island and on Tonga. 

 The Carohnes doubtless were colonised from Asia." 



Again, Mr. Moss says, " The rude character of the struc- 

 tures is apparent. Not a vestige of art or workmanship of 

 any kind is to be seen." Now, the Langiis at Tongatabu 

 show sculpture, as do the images at Easter Island. 



At Tele, forming one of the Ualau or Strong Island Group 

 (Ualau rises 2,000 ft., and is a basaltic island), are similar 

 interesting ruins built of enormous blocks of basalt, showing 

 that the people who shifted them about knew how to handle 

 great weights, like the pyramid-builders m Mexico, Peru, and 

 Egypt, and those who erected the stone ruins we find at 

 Stonehenge or in northern France. 



There are also several artificial canals and a canoe-harbour 

 at Tele. These artificial canals show an acquaintance with 

 the ancient canal system of Mexico and Peru, and that the 

 migration of people who built them may have come direct 

 from America. The ruins in Tele are stated by the natives 

 to have been built by the former inhabitants partly for their 

 defence and partly in honour of the dead, the large blocks of 

 stone being brought from the main island on rafts. This, 

 again, shows an acquaintance with the manner the red-granite 

 blocks of Syene in Upper Egypt were anciently rafted down 

 the river to Lower Egypt in flood-time, also with the way 

 the Assyrians rafted great weights down their rivers. I do 

 not think the present inhabitants of any of the Carolines 

 know how to remove these heavy weights. A great weight is 

 sometimes moved in the islands by rolling or pushing it into 

 deep water, lifting it and fastening it under two strong canoes, 

 and then sailing or paddling it to any required distant point. 

 But this, again, only proves an acquaintance with ancient 

 raft-movement, as it were. 



Captain C. A. Bridge, of H.M.S. " Espiegle," read an 

 excellent paper, I believe, upon these ruins before the Eoyal 

 Society, but I have not seen it. All that I wish to show is 

 the part played by volcanic action in then- origin. 



* We really have to go back at least to the pyramid-builders (3,500 

 years ago) to reach an age where the people executed such works as we 

 find at Tongatabu, Easter Island, and the Carolines. The latter, however, 

 appear to be rude and cyclopean, another proof of the lapse of the thirty- 

 five centuries of human time. Geological time (millions of years) I am not 

 referring to at all, as my task is only to record the surface facts as I find 

 them now in the Pacific. If the coral-polyp is nature's scavenger, and 

 keeps the waters of the ocean pure by extracting the excess of lime within 

 equatorial limits, fixing it there in the form of coral reefs, there must, 

 I suppose, be some method of redistribution or the equatorial regions 

 would soon be all lime. Upheaval and subsidence resulting from great 

 volcanic action may be the methods nature employs to melt and redistri- 

 bute this excess of lime and keep everything equal on the planet. 



