428 Transactions. — Geology. 



Such, briefly, are the conditions under which the striated 

 stones occur, lying loose on the ground only where the grass or 

 vegetation has been removed to a depth of a foot or more. Care- 

 ful search failed to find any exposure of a matrix of clay or other 

 material of glacial origin in which the stones were imbedded. 

 If a boulder-clay exists at either of the localities in which the 

 stones have been met with it will probably only be found by 

 removing the soil to some depth. The occurrence of striated 

 stones thus lying loose in the surface-soil is somewhat similar to 

 the case of the glacial beds of Coleraine, Victoria, where there 

 are large areas in which almost every stone lying loose on the 

 ground is striated, while the matrix of boulder-clay is found only 

 slightly exposed in two localities at a considerable distance from 

 the areas in question. 



The striated stones were all coarse- or fine-grained sandstone, 

 often indurated. There is nothing to show that they may not 

 be of purely local origin. There was no trace of granite or other 

 rock quite foreign to the district. The stones were of moderate 

 size, the longest dimension of the largest one seen not being 

 more than 10 in. Nothing of the nature of a smoothed or striated 

 surface of the bed-rock was to be seen, nor anything which 

 could with certainty be described as a roche moutonnce. 



Apart from the discovery of the stones themselves, the feature 

 of greatest interest is the height above the lake-level at which 

 they occur on the hill-track ; but before dealing with this point 

 it is necessary to refer very briefly to the general question of 

 glaciation in the Lake Wakatipu basin. 



There seems little reason to doubt that through the midst of 

 the region now occupied by the waters of Lake Wakatipu origin- 

 ally flowed a river of large dimensions, whose course was con- 

 tinued through the area now occupied by the terminal moraine 

 at Kingston. At a subsequent stage a submergence of the land 

 sufficient to admit the waters of the ocean took place, and during 

 a prolonged period of time beds of shale, sandstone, and lime- 

 stone were being deposited in what is now the lake-basin. These 

 beds attained a thickness of 600 ft., and are found on both sides 

 of the lake, and it is therefore highly probable that they extended 

 continuously right across the lake-basin. As they rest uncon- 

 formably on the eroded edges of the underlying schists, and at 

 Twelve-mile Creek dip in towards the lake at an angle of 15°, it is 

 clear that considerable denudation had already taken place over 

 the area of the lake-basin before the formation of these later 

 beds. The scooping-out of the trough in which the limestone 

 and its associated beds rest has been attributed to ice-action, but 

 no sufficient evidence is forthcoming to support this view. Later 

 on there was a re-elevation of the land, anil again the work of 



