viii Obituary. 



and a few selected specimens were displayed in the Colonial Museum 

 under their generic names, but the great bulk were stored away and have 

 only recently been partially re-examined. Over 120,000 fossils were 

 acquired by the Geological Survey under Sir James Hector, and of these 

 a considerable majority were collected by Mr. McKay. This tangible 

 result was considered by him his greatest achievement, but it is easily 

 outweighed by his contributions to the field and structural geology of 

 New Zealand. 



During his geological explorations Mr. McKay covered almost the whole 

 area of New Zealand, and in accordance with the practice then in vogue 

 he prepared reports on all his travels. These papers, published in the 

 Reports of Geological Explorations, still form the only source of information 

 for many districts in New Zealand. In his later years he resumed many 

 of his earlier observations in papers dealing with larger districts, such as 

 , Central Otago, Marlborough, and the West Coast. As a writer he was 

 not always lucid, and seldom graceful in style ; indeed, his earlier papers 

 show that writing must have been a great labour to him. He was under 

 the further disadvantage of not being able to give a simple descriptive 

 account of what he observed, but of having to interpret it in terms of the 

 official classification adopted by the Survey. Nevertheless he had the 

 merit not to suppress any discordant observations, and it is easy for one 

 familiar with the classification adopted to obtain from the reports a clear 

 enough account of the geological sequence he observed. As a field geologist 

 he was a reliable worker, and in districts regarding which controversies 

 have arisen his account has generally stood the test of time. 



During the last few years of the old Geological Survey, and subse- 

 quently during his employment by the Mines Department, Mr. McKay 

 broke fresh ground in the domain of structural geology. In 1884-85 he 

 traversed the Middle Clarence Valley, and in 1888-89 the Awatere Valley, 

 in each of which there are long strips of Notocene rocks resting on one 

 side of the valley unconformably on the older rocks, and bounded by long 

 fault-lines on the other. On each side the old rocks rise into mountains 

 of 6,000 ft. to 9,000 ft. The presence, in the Notocene series, of the Amuri 

 limestone, a fine-grained chalky limestone containing little or no terrigenous 

 sediment, led Mr. McKay to conclude that at the time of its formation the 

 Kaikoura Mountains, as such, were not in existence. Since the Notocene 

 series is structurally involved in the mountains, he concluded that the 

 latter originated at a comparatively recent (post-Miocene) date. His 

 subsequent work was devoted mainly to the extension of this theory of 

 mountain-building by block-faulting (although he did not actually use 

 these terms) throughout the rest of New Zealand, and notably in Central 

 Otago. Although this work received little attention at the time, it is 

 now accepted as substantially correct by the majority of New Zealand 

 geologists, and it is greatly to Mr. McKay's credit that he originated the 

 idea independently of any influence from other countries. 



In his later years he devoted much attention to photography, and was 

 very successful in obtaining photomicrographs of igneous rocks, and also 

 long-distance views of the Tararua Mountains from his home in Kelburn. 



J. A. T. 



