282 NOTES AND EXHIBITS. 



entirely alone. They used to bring me all the eggs, pick out the 

 fresh ones and give them to me, and, with a little present of sugar 

 or matches, go off quite happy. Indeed, but for their timely 

 supply of eggs I should have been in a position of some danger, 

 for my supplies failed me, and we really had nothing else. I 

 could write to some length upon the subject, but to call them 

 miserable and degraded is a very grave mistake. I have dealt 

 with the fierce tribes of the Queensland interior, and of West 

 Australia, and on the overland telegraph line, but never met a 

 more harmless race than these. In your travels you were not so 

 fortunate I think. "What it may be when the whites appear, I 

 cannot say — trouble may be brought on then, but, often enough 

 the white man is the aggressor. 



" A powerful diamond-driU is now at work, boring for water 

 North of Eucla, others will find water as I have done ; and, 

 before long, these solitudes will be busy centres of pastoral 

 industry, but few will think of the weary anxiety that was 

 experienced by the pioneer. I make but poor headway with my 

 paper for the E.Gr.S., for I use the axe more than the pen; and 

 they will lose but little if it never leaves my writing-case. I 

 anxiously look forward to the time when your letter may arrive, 

 which will refer to the specimens forwarded now eight months or 

 more since. I expect to reach Fowler's Bay in about two months' 

 time. The questions that I had intended to ask were concerning 

 the Ironstone and the Granite, and the Sand Eange, and how to 

 account for a shell deposited 1,200 feet above Oldea, and the 

 Eange intervening. I enclose a tracing drawn to scale, but 

 roughly illustrating the known extent of Grranite, and the Oldea 

 Sand Eange." 



The President then stated that he had been requested by Dr. 

 Hector, the Director of the New Zealand Gfeological Survey, to 

 furnish a Paelontological report on the Fossil Eadiata of the 

 tertiary formations of that Colony. This request was made at 

 the time of the International Exhibition on behalf of the Colonial 



