FIJI-NEW ZEALAND EXPEDITION 311 
D’Urville Island across Wanganui Bight, eighty miles away. 
At a commanding point on the right bank and on a remnant 
of a higher terrace is located the Sargent Art Gallery, said to be 
the best in New Zealand. There is a small but well kept museum, 
fine schools, an astronomical observatory, and the town boasts a 
philosophical society with a very creditable list of publications. 
West of Wanganui along the coast are a number of out- 
crops of highly fossiliferous Pliocene beds. The publications on 
these are well known, and the writer’s hope of making collections 
of the fossils was not in vain. In company with Mr. R. Murdoch, 
a local geologist of some repute two of the outcrops were visited. 
At Castlecliff the beds are gray to bluish in color, fine-grained, 
pumiceous, and slightly micaceous. They are quite soft and as a 
result the shells can be removed with a strong knife blade. The 
beds dip to the southeast and the 75-foot ‘‘cliff’’ is at the land- 
ward edge of a wave-cut terrace. Huge blocks of the formation 
are undermined and later destroyed by the waves. These are the 
bonanzas from which scores of fine shells were dug. The fauna 
has a high percentage of modern species, but to the northwest as 
older beds rise the proportion of extinct species is greater and 
greater. The fauna is largely molluscan but there are a few 
brachiopods, bryozoa, barnacles, and sand-dollars. The shells are 
very brittle but by leaving them in the matrix and packing eare- 
fully they withstood their long journey remarkably well. They 
preserve the most delicate markings and make a fine group for 
study. At Kai-Iwi, farther north, is a higher cliff than at Castle- 
eliff, and the fauna is slightly different. A busy day here with 
Mr. Murdoch yielded a lot of fine specimens to which our genial 
guide added several from his own collections, a number of which 
were not found by us at either locality. 
On top of the Pliocene bluffs and separated by an unconformity 
are from four to ten feet or more of a peaty deposit thought to 
be of Pleistocene age. Landward from the cliff are at least three 
series of terraces and remnants of a fourth which tell of the up- 
ward movements of the region, and there are evidences such as 
the Pleistocene peat bogs and others to show opposite movements 
at times. The shore in places is a mass of shifting dunes whose 
sands are derived from the easily destroyed Kai-Iwi beds. Some 
of the shore drift sand is black and is derived from the Egmont 
lavas, ground by the waves and drifted along by the prevailing 
