57 



was completed and opened, the first Curator being Captain F. W. 

 Hutton (afterwards Professor Hutton, F.R.S.). Captain Hutton was 

 succeeded by Professor T. J. Parker, F.R.S., under whose direction 

 some of the most striking exhibits were added. Notable among these 

 is the series of elasmobranch skeletons, not surpassed in any museum 

 in the world. The method by which they were prepared was worked 

 out by Professor Parker and Edwin Jennings, Museum ta.xidermist. 

 On the death of Professor Parker in 1897 Dr - w - B. Benham, F.R.S., 

 was appointed to the Chair of Biology and became Curator of the 

 Museum. 



A notable benefaction was the gift by Dr. T. M. Hocken, in 1907, 

 of his great collection of books, manuscripts, and pictures relating to 

 early New Zealand and the Pacific, and his large ethnographic collec- 

 tion. The Hocken collection includes the largest series in existence 

 of manuscripts relating to the settlement -of New Zealand. 



The zoological collections are extensive, being especially strong 

 in New Zealand birds and their eggs, in New Zealand fishes, and in the 

 invertebrates. Of special interest is the series of extinct birds, the 

 collection of moa-remains being very extensive, and including eggs, 

 feathers, muscles, skin, and footprints, as well as the largest number 

 of individual skeletons in any museum. 



The foundation of the ethnographic department was laid by a 

 series of gifts of New Guinea material by James Chalmers (" Tamate "), 

 missionary to New Guinea and Polynesia. The large collection from 

 the Solomons, the important New Hebridean collection, and the ex- 

 tensive Maori section have also been built up by gifts. Perhaps the 

 most notable exhibit here is the material from the moa-hunters' camp 

 at the mouth of the Shag River, which reveals the stage of culture 

 reached by the earliest inhabitants of these southern districts. Their 

 culture would seem, on the whole, higher than that of the tribes found 

 in occupation at the beginning of the nineteenth century. 



H. D. SKINNER. 



THE MICA -SCHISTS OF CENTRAL OTAGO. 



One of the most puzzling formations in New Zealand is a broad 

 zone of mica-schists running out from the Southern Alps south-east- 

 wards through Otago to the sea. The planes of schistosity, which may 

 be in the main parallel to the original bedding-planes, dip generally 

 at small angles to the south-west or north-east from a broad anticline, 

 the axis of which runs down to the sea-coast about ten miles south- 

 west of Dunedin. Locally, however, the schists dip steeply, or are 

 crumpled. Interstratified in these are rarely chloritic or hornblendic 

 schists. To these rocks all ages, from Archaean to Jurassic, have been 

 assigned. They are not associated with plutonic rocks, but a fairly 

 regular passage may sometimes be traced outwards from the axis where 

 the metamorphism is greatest through decreasingly metamorphosed 

 rocks into greywackes which resemble both those of Ordovician age in 

 the western parts of the Island and those in the fossiliferous Permo- 

 Carboniferous or Triassic series, and, indeed, merge without apparent 



