Fox.— The Waitemata Series. 487 



Harbour. This puy stood, perhaps, on the bank of the river 

 near its mouth. 



About a quarter of a mile to the east and nearer the shore 

 a long low reef is exposed, which I visited in a boat, with the 

 object of seeing whether the outcrop of the Cheltenham grit 

 was here. The reef proved, however, to be the Parnell grit, 

 lacking, as usual, coarse fragments, and unfossihferous except 

 for a few Bryozoa, which my friend Mr. E. K. Mules dis- 

 covered, but which were too weathered for identification. 

 There is a second smaller reef parallel to the first and only a 

 few yards distant. The second reef is probably only another 

 part of the grit. This outcrop of the grit is about as coarse 

 as that at St John's College. 



The next easterly outcrop is at Howick. The Tamaki 

 Gulf is crossed by a bridge at Panmure, about three miles 

 from the mouth. Crossing this bridge, and making for a 

 point near the mouth, it is easy to miss a long headland 

 of cliffs which forms the east head of the gulf. Viewing 

 this headland from the terminus of the road, it seems a small 

 one, and the strata appear horizontal, so that Mr. Park, 

 observing it doubtless from this point, wrote that the strata 

 •' are horizontal to the Tamaki, and consist of sandstones." 

 I fell into precisely the same error, and it was not until 

 several weeks later that I had an opportunity of seeing the 

 real extent and position of the beds from the harbour. Un- 

 fortunately, I was too far distant to make exact observations, 

 and I was not able to revisit the spot, but it was evident that 

 not only are the beds much disturbed, but that at intervals 

 there occurs a bed much resembling the Parnell grit. 



Beyond the bay to the east of these cliffs occurs an 

 undoubted outcrop of the grit. Mr. Park, who examined 

 the same bed rather farther along, savs that it is coarser 

 than the Parnell beds, and " contains lumps of limestone 

 in its lower parts." It certainly is coarser than the grit at 

 Parnell, but very little coarser than the grit at the other side 

 of the Tamaki, which Mr. Park did not observe. It is about 

 20 ft. thick, and traversed by veins of calcite. These in 

 places have thickened into lumpy masses, and have fallen 

 frequently in this form to the foot of the cliff, and 

 are possibly what are described as " lumps of Kaipara 

 limestone." In some places the veins are beautitully 

 crystalline, containing large crystals of calcite in dog-tooth 

 spar form. At other times the calcite crystals are small 

 (requiring a lens to distinguish their outline) but very 

 numerous, and forming a white sparkling surface to the 

 black grit. 



The grit lies in all places conformably on the underlying 

 sandstones, and is also overlain by sandstones in a per- 



