Hill.— 0/^ the Kidncq^pcr and Pohui Conglomerates. M9 



Younger Pliockke. 

 II. Kaiwaka series. 



4. Sandy clays, brown sands, and conglomerates, underlying and 



alternating pumiceous sands, sliUles, and conglomerates. 



5. Pumice and sandstone conglomerates of Esk Valley below 



Kaiwaka Creek. 

 G. Pctane clay-marls and brown sands. 



III. Waipatiki series. 



7. Lower Petano limestones. 



8. Pamice-sands and sandy clays. 



9. Petane upper limestone. 



IV. Mahia series. 



^ ■ [ IMahia pumices and blue sandy-clay beds. 



Pleistocene. 



12. Kidnapper conglomerates and pumice. 



It will be seen from this summarized classification how 

 very widely separated are the two readiiigs of the Kidnapper 

 conglomerates to which Mr. McKay refers on page 192 of his 

 report. The conglomerates were classed as conformable to 

 the Te x\ute limestones in the first instance, and, simply 

 because similar beds are met with at Eedcliffe, near Taradale, 

 resting, as Mr. McKay rightly interprets, on the Petane clays, 

 they are at once separated from the limestones by the other 

 beds, and they are further transferred from older Pliocene, or 

 Upper Miocene, to Pleistocene, and this for no other reason 

 than that they are found at Eedclift'e on the top of rocks 

 representing the Petane clays. In the Kidnapper beds the 

 fossils can be shovelled up from several bands that intervene 

 between the limestones and the pumice ; but all the shells 

 are recent, and correspond more closely with those found in 

 the artesian beds underneath the Heretaunga Plain, and which 

 were described in my second paper on artesian wells, a year 

 ago, than with the fossils in the limestones below them. 



Before the present classification was made by Mr. McKay 

 I had directed attention to the then classification adopted by 

 the Geological Survey authorities, in which the Kidnapper 

 pumice- and conglomerate-beds were made to pass underneath 

 the Scinde Island limestones. The recent classification, as 

 pointed out above, has separated the Kidnapper pumice* and 

 conglomerate-beds from the limestones on which they rest by 

 a very great gap indeed ; but it seems to me that the diffi- 

 culties in the way of harmonizing the stratigraphical arrange- 

 ment of the rocks h\ this district have been increased very 

 much thei'eby. 



Let it be remembered that tlie Te Aute limestones, so 

 Mr. McKay says, are at the Black Eeef within eight miles 

 of Napier, and that between the Scinde Island limestones 

 and those at the Black Reef, on which the Kidnapper beds. 



