326 Transactions. 



Table II. — Dates of the Principal Visits of Geologists to the District. 



Date of Visit. 



Date of Publication (see 

 Bibliography). 



The earliest notice of the district is that of C. Forbes (1855), who was 

 assistant surgeon to H.M.S. " Acheron."' He describes a journey up the 

 bed of the Kowhai River to the foot of Mount Grey and a descent by the 

 Karetu River, a tributary of the Okuku. The area he traversed thus 

 probably lies just outside that treated in this paper, but he deals with the 

 upper Notocene rocks of the same strip. He mentions the tilted gravels, 

 since assigned by Speight (1919) to the Kowhai series,, and a stratum of 

 hard blue clay dipping south-east at an angle of 35° and containing an 

 immense number of marine shells, the genera of which are specified. The 

 blue clay underlies sandstone, and higher up the river similar beds are 

 represented by dense, hard, blue limestone. These sandstones and blue 

 clays belong doubtless to the Greta series (Waitotaran), and are obviously 

 Tertiary, although Forbes expresses no opinion on this point. 



In 1859 T. H. Cockburn Hood discovered and collected saurian remains 

 in the bed of the Waipara River and forwarded them to the British Museum. 

 These fossils were described by R. Owen (1861), under the name of Plesio- 

 saurus australis, and referred to the Jurassic period. This find stimulated 

 great interest among geologists, although the earlv visits of von Haast and 

 Hector were fruitless so far as further specimens were concerned. In his 

 first visit, in 1864, von Haast apparently mistook the cup-shaped Polyzoa from 

 the lower Movint Brown beds for saurian vertebrae, and in consequence 

 considered the saurians as survivors into the Tertiary. In 1870 he acknow- 

 ledged his mistake and credited the discovery of the true position of the 

 " saurian beds " to Hector. The next considerable collection of saurian 

 remains was again made by Cockburn Hood, in 1868, but on their way to 

 England the specimens were unfortunately lost through the wreck of the ship 

 '■ Matoaka."' Von Haast had fortunately made drawings and taken measure- 

 ments of the more important bones, on which he published a note in 1870. 



