IV.— GEOLOGY. 



Art LV.— On the Geology of Scinde Island. 

 By Captain F. W. Hutton, F.G.S. 



[Read before the Philosophical Institute of Canterbury, 2nd July, 1885.] 



Plate XIII., fig. 6. 



The first notice of the geology of the isolated, rocky bluff called 

 " Scinde Island," on which the Town of Napier is partly built, 

 is a section by Mr. Triphook, published by Dr. von Hochstetter 

 in the " Eeise der Novara" (Geologishert, Theil I., p. 2), but 

 Dr. von Hochstetter did not himself visit the locality. This 

 section is from Cape Kidnappers to Petane, and shows the Scinde 

 Island rocks as an outlier of the Petane beds, which lie four 

 or five miles to the north. Dr. von Hochstetter called them the 

 "Hawke's Bay Series" — "limestones, sandstones, and clay- 

 marls replete with fossils : Pecten triphooki, Zittel ; Venus, Mytilus, 

 Pectunculus, Trochita," etc., and considered them as belonging to 

 the younger of the two systems into which he divided our 

 tertiary rocks. 



In 1871 Dr. Hector reported on the district, and agreed with 

 Mr. Triphook, saying that 'the Scinde Island beds belonged to 

 the upper part of the formation, and occupied the centre of 

 a syncline from Cape Kidnappers to Pohui, which lies on the 

 road from Napier to Lake Taupo.* 



Among the tertiary fossils in the Colonial Museum at 

 Wellington, which I examined in 1872, were some from "Napier 

 and Cape Kidnappers,"! and these I referred to the " Ahuriri 

 Formation" (since called the Ahuriri series of the Pareora 

 system), making them older than the Wanganui Formation, 

 (" Cat. Tert. Moll, and Echin. of N.Z.," p. 8,) which at that 

 time was only known on the west, coast of Wellington. There 

 were no fossils from the Petane beds in the Museum, and, 

 consequently, no opinion was expressed as to the age of that 

 series. 



* " Eeports Geol. Survey," 1870-71, p. 159. 



["Catalogue of the Colonial Museum," 1870, p. 180.— " Limestones 

 and clay-marls exposed in the cliffs around Scinde Island, and along the 

 coast. The same formation is general throughout the east part of Hawke's 

 Bay." 



