FIJI-NEW ZEALAND EXPEDITION 301 
land stood higher above the sea than it does to-day. Since then 
the area has been beneath the sea and a very thick veneer con- 
sisting of a succession of alternating beds of soft sandstone, and 
tough blue clays have been laid down as an €stuarine or slack 
water deposit. Later the region was uplifted but not to its former 
elevation. As a result Auckland and its environs are located on 
a region of sharp relief which has been softened and masked by 
the later deposit known by the Maori as the ‘‘papa’’ rock and by 
geologists as the Waitemata beds. A knowledge and appreciation 
of these simple geological relations have greatly modified the gen- 
eral work of harbor development and the reclamation of the low 
land about the end of Queens street. The ‘‘papa’’ rock is the 
origin of the fine soils of much of the Auckland peninsula justly 
famous for its agriculture, dairying, and stock breeding. 
In places the Waitemata series is abundantly fossiliferous. 
Dredgings from the bottom of the harbor excavations yield quan- 
tities of mollusean remains which are very well preserved. A 
small but representative series was collected. Some thin layers 
are more or less calcareous and contain a wealth of foraminifera. 
These and other fossils of the ‘‘papa’’ rock have been made fam- 
ous in a monograph by the Austrian paleontologists, Zittel, Kar- 
rer and Stache, of the ‘‘Novara’’ expedition of 1864. 
The most obvious geological phenomenon of the Auckland area 
is the numerous cones of small extinct voleanoes. Rangitoto is 
the largest of over sixty which occur in the district. The streets 
and town lots of Auckland have been laid out with reference to 
these natural features, and much of the landscape effect incident 
to the arrangement of homes and gardens in the residence dis- 
tricts is due to the cones, lava slopes and ridges of voleaniec origin. 
A pretty eminence of this kind in the southern part of the city 
is Mt. Eden. At its top is a large crater partly filled with reddish 
elinkery scoria. Its slopes are a succession of lava-flow terraces. 
At one point on its flank is an artificial opening whence are re- 
moved great quantities of scoria for road metal. The one hundred 
foot face of the workings shows well the nature of the extrusive 
material which in certain layers is much like slag. Occasional 
dikes and sheets of solidified lava tell another side of the voleanie 
story. In the debris were picked up examples of voleanic bombs 
of the size and shape of small hand grenades. 
On one of the lava-flow terraces in the residence district we 
