Park. — On Granitic Bocks in the King-country. 355 



were rough-crushed and washed by Mr. Griffiths, are also 

 believed to have yielded a speck or two of the precious 

 metal. 



The exact locality of the discovery is situated on the left 

 bank of the Mangaone Stream, about a quarter of a mile 

 above its junction with the Turitea Eiver, which rises among 

 the wooded Tapuaea Hills, lying some two miles east of the 

 Hauturu Eange, and falls into the Waipa Eiver four miles 

 south of Alexandra. 



From Otorohanga southward to the Upper Mokau, and 

 westward to the sources of the Waitomo and Moakurarua 

 Streams, the country is occupied by long, low, undulating or 

 flat-topped ridges and spurs, in most places covered with a 

 dense growth of fern and tutu, with here and there, in 

 sheltered places, isolated clumps of forest vegetation which 

 have survived the general destruction of the great forest which 

 in comparatively recent times covered the whole of the Waipa 

 and Mokau Valleys. 



This land, I am informed, still belongs to the natives. It 

 comprises an area probably not far short of 200,000 acres, 

 almost all of which are most desirable for European occupa- 

 tion. It is readily accessible to a constructed railway, and 

 when thrown open to settlement will become one of the 

 richest and most prosperous pastoral districts in the North 

 Island. 



These fern-covered hills and ridges are principally com- 

 posed of soft green and yellowish-coloured calcareous sand- 

 stones, interstratined with blue marly crumbling clays, called 

 "papa" by the natives. Both the sandstones and clays con- 

 tain an abundance of marine shells and corals ; and towards 

 their base, where there is an excess of calcareous matter, they 

 pass into a hard limestone, in many places of great purity and 

 of much value for burning into lime for agricultural and build- 

 ing purposes. They are of Cretaceo-tertiary age, and form an 

 important and well-marked series of the coal-measures of New 

 Zealand. In this district, as well as in other places in this 

 central region of this Island, they are distinguished by the 

 presence of valuable seams of superior brown coal, occurring 

 at the base of the formation at the point where it rests on the 

 old denuded floor of the country. It is a noticeable circum- 

 stance here, as at Whangarei and Kawakawa, that where the 

 hard semi-crystalline limestone rests on, or approaches, the 

 old rocky floor the coal is usually absent, or represented only 

 by a streak of impure carbonaceous shale. This would tend 

 to show that the limestone and coal were, in part at least, 

 the result of contemporaneous developments of growths, the 

 former on a sea-bottom, the latter on low-lying swampy areas 

 contiguous to the sea. 



