524 Transactions. — Geology. 



one of the most beautiful pieces of extinct volcanic scenery in 

 the Southern Hemisphere — kindly furnish us with the com- 

 pass bearings of the mouths of the different craters, in order 

 that we may judge of the wind's direction at the time when 

 they were in activity. In Fiji I think the low side of some 

 of the craters faced the south-east, but I only write from 

 memory. The highest side of a crater is always to leeward of 

 the prevailing wind, owing to the dust and scoria being blown 

 in that direction 



Fiji and Samoa are clearly of volcanic origin, but in times 

 so long past that it would be difficult to guess when they were 

 thrown up from the sea. I noticed many extinct craters in 

 Fiji and Samoa, but there are no active ones. There are, how- 

 ever, warm springs in a few places. 



The three principal Tongan islands are low, being quite 

 different to the towering majestic hills of the former 

 groups. Tonga appears to me to be the result of one 

 gentle upheaval ; yet the Langiis in Tongatabu must have 

 been built ccBval with the ruins we find at Stonehenge, 

 Brittany, Central America, and other places. Mr. A. W. 

 Mackay kindly gave me two photographs of the trinolith 

 there, which I lay before the meeting. I have always 

 considered the stone images of Easter Island and the 

 trinolith at Tonga came from almost the one and the same 

 people, existing at the time of the pyramid-building age, four 

 to five thousand years ago — a gentle, unwarlike, artistic race, 

 submerged by successive barbarous Asiatic or Malayan colo- 

 nising expeditions from Japan and Borneo. (" Viti " or " fiji " 

 in Japanese means "a chain of hills"; Mount Fuji is its 

 sacred mountain, I think.) Mr. Mackay promised to send me 

 a paper containing a minute description of the Langiis, which 

 I will lay before members as soon as I get it. The ruins at 

 Ponape and Espiritu Santo, in the New Hebrides — and I think 

 some will be found also in New Caledonia — may have dated 

 from the same time, or they may be of a later construction — 

 perhaps later. 



Generally the ruins found in different islands in the Pacific 

 will be found a subject of most interesting study. We find 

 them at Tonga, Espiritu Santo (New Hebrides), Ponape, the 

 Carolines, I think New Caledonia, Easter Island, and I am 

 not certain whether there are not traces of the mound-builders 

 to be met with in the Sandwich Group and Tahiti. It may 

 have been that the Aztecs and Toltecs of Central America and 

 the highly civilised ancient Peruvians sent out their colonising 

 galleys westw^ard into the Pacific four or five thousand years 

 ago, and it is the ruins left by these colonies we find to-day ; 

 the Malayan and Negrettic populations we now find in the 

 Pacific being of a later date, and having submerged the old 



