242 Transactions. 



A careful examination of the lower forms of animal life belonging to the 

 Kermadecs will ultimately provide a definite solution to the problem ; but 

 our present knowledge is by no means satisfactory, though no doubt when 

 all the collections made by the party are fully worked up much additional 

 information will be available. Mr. H. Suter has furnished me with details 

 concerning the land MoUusca of the group, and he concludes that the islands 

 are the meeting-ground for forms belonging both to Polynesia and New 

 Zealand, but that the former preponderated over the latter. The mere 

 presence of land MoUusca on an island nearly five hundred miles from other 

 land, notwithstanding the readiness with which they can be transported in 

 the juvenile state, is certainly suggestive of a continental connection. This 

 conclusion is strongly supported by the character of the marine MoUusca. 

 The higher percentage of Polynesian forms points to a closer or more recent 

 connection with the islands to the north than with New Zealand ; and this 

 fact is borne out by a study of the form of the sea-bottom and the depth 

 of the sea over the area through which communication probably took place. 

 This conclusion is apparently at variance with that arrived at by Mr. Cheese- 

 man. 



The peculiarities in distribution of plants and animals in the southern 

 Pacific islands have suggested to several eminent naturaUsts the probability 

 of the former existence of a continent in that region. They approached 

 the subject from the biological side, without the advantage of the geo- 

 logical knowledge that we now possess. Alfred Russell Wallace says in his 

 " Island Life," " It is possible, too, that there may have been an extension 

 [of New Zealand] northward to the Kermadec Islands, and even further, 

 to the Tonga and Fiji Islands, though this is hardly probable, or we should 

 find more community between their productions and those of New Zealand." 

 Wallace, however, looked to a connection with north-eastern Australia as 

 being most probable. H. 0. Forbes* had a similar idea of the existence of 

 a continental area in this region, and included it imder the vast continent 

 in the Southern Hemisphere to which he gave the name Antarctica. 



Captain Hutton held very strongly to the opinion that New Zealand 

 was connected at one time to a Pacific continent. As early as the year 

 1872 he advocated the theory, and in his presidential address before the 

 Philosophical Institute of Canterbury, 1883, pubhshed in the " New Zealand 

 Journal of Science," 1884, and also in the " Annals and Magazine of Natural 

 History," vol. xiii, 1884, he discussed the matter from a biological standpoint. 

 He said then, " We must suppose that it was during the Upper Jurassic or 

 Lower Cretaceous period that New Zealand was joined to the South Pacific 

 continent, while during the Eocene it extended towards New Caledonia, 

 and again in the Pliocene towards the Kermadecs." The last statement 

 is an inference from the extension of glaciers in New Zealand, which Captain 

 Hutton put in Pliocene times, and attributed to elevation of the land. It 

 seems difficult, however, to account for the absence of glaciation in the 

 North Island if that elevation extended nearly as far north as the Kermadecs ; 

 and it seems probable that elevation was only one of the causes of that 

 glaciation. 



Later on, in his " Index Faunse Novse-Zealandiae," and again in the year 

 1905, in a letter to Nature (vol. Ixxii, page 245), he urged the existence of 

 a tropical and subtropical trans-Pacific continent during Cretaceous and 



* Forbes, H. 0.: "Natural Science," vol. iii, 1893. 



