IV.— GEOLOGY. 



Art. XXXVIII. — Notes on the Napier-Greenmeadoivs Road. 

 By F. Hutchinson, Jun. 



[Bead before the Haivke's Bay Philosophical Institute, 10th June, 1901.] 



The following rough notes on the natural history of one of 

 our main roads are given not from any scientific value that 

 they may have at the present time, but from a possible 

 historic interest, as the area through which the road runs is 

 changing rapidly from swamp and mud-flat to dry land, with 

 a corresponding and most striking change in its living in- 

 habitants, both plant and animal. This change is from causes 

 both natural and artificial. The natural causes may all be 

 summed up practically in one word — floods. From the 

 smallest up-country freshet that just tinges the river-channel 

 with yellow to the wild outpourings of April, 1897, each and 

 every manifestation of the power of rain helps the spread of 

 the dry land seaward. 



It is to the work of that wild Easter-tide on this road that 

 we may turn for a vivid illustration of reclamation, change, 

 and renewal. Before 1897 the first section of this road that 

 is clear of the town — that between the railway-crossing and 

 the Tutaekuri Bridge — was bordered on each side by mud- 

 flats covered daily by the tide. Tenanted by countless crabs 

 and estuarine shells, a feeding-ground for gulls and curlews, 

 its only plant-growth mats of sea-grass — Zostera marina — this 

 area looked as if its time as habitable dry land was very far 

 off. But the great flood buried the mud-flats and their 

 denizens deep in silt, so deep that the area rose above the 

 influence of the tide and stretched on either side a sweep of 

 featureless sand for the rest of the winter. With the spring, 

 however, the salt-weed, Salicomia indica, began to creep 

 in from the landward edges, and a small green rush-like plant 

 sprang up in great quantities. This latter plant was Triglochin 

 triandrum. Till this visitation of 1897 it was somewhat un- 

 common here. Mr. Colenso, in a delightful paper on the flora 

 of the Napier Swamp in the old days, speaks, if I remember 



