Cussen. — Notes on the King Country. 829 



lake and the Hauhungaroa Range, are immense beds of white 

 pumice sands, through which the rivers and streams have worn 

 out for themselves deep channelled courses, with frequently wide 

 canons at the bottom. Part of the northern shore and a great 

 deal of the eastern shore of the lake is formed by cliffs of pure 

 pumice, in one place 300 feet above the lake, and spreading 

 thence southerly and easterly to the slopes of the Kaimanawa 

 Eange, covering the country with a deep deposit of over 100 

 feet in thickness. In a north and north-east direction it extends 

 for many miles, covering the Kaingaroa Plains, and leaving deep 

 deposits over all the valleys from Taupo to Atiamuri and 

 Whakamaru. 



Motutaiko is an interesting feature of the lake. It is formed 

 of a column of rhyolitic lava ascending perpendicularly from 

 the floor of the lake to a height of 600 feet, half of it being 

 above and half below the water. On the north side of the 

 island are masses of coarse conglomerate, consisting of glassy 

 varieties of rhyolite, obsidian, etc., and interbedded with 

 tuff and pumice sands. The rhyolite on Motutaiko is a 

 very remarkable kind of lava, and I have seen nothing 

 like it elsewhere in the district. It has a decidedly lamellar 

 or stratified structure ; the thin sheets of stone lie one 

 over the other, and would seem to have been of a very viscid 

 character, cooling as the thin liquid sheets moved over one 

 another, and assuming very ropy, twisted, and contorted forms. 

 This is doubtless the same class of rock discovered by Dr. 

 Hochstetter, which, he says, the Natives called taupo, and from 

 which the lake is said to have its name. In his description, he 

 says : — 



" It consists of an extremely remarkable kind of rock, 

 which has attracted the attention of every stranger travelling 

 along the lake. It is a volcanic rock of very striking lamellar 

 structure ; like the leaves of a book, sometimes of microscopic 

 fineness, the thin lamellar sheets of stone lie one above another. 

 Greyish black layers, resembling silicious schist of various lighter 

 and darker shades, alternate with pearl-grey, violet, flesh- 

 coloured, sometimes even with brick-coloured layers, so that the 

 streaky mass reminds the observer of agate. From the numerous 

 white transparent quartz grains, and small yellowish-white fel- 

 spar crystals (sanidine) enclosed, it moreover has a porphyritic 

 structure, while in smaller or larger vesicular spaces light-brown 

 mica appears. There can be no doubt of the genuine lava 

 character of the rock. As by the stretching and pulling of a 

 mass composed of mixed fusions, artificially streaked glass is 

 produced, so this rock is likely to have originated from a volcanic 

 magma composed of various stone fusions." 



Richthofen has, in 1860, described quite a similar kind of 

 rock from the vicinity of Tokay, Saraspatak, etc., in Hungary, 



