198 A NEW ZEALAND NATURALIST'S CALENDAR. 



moved from height to height. There is no walking so 

 refreshing to mind and body as is met with on the crest 

 of a ridge, where the view is not continually shut in, and 

 as long as the wind is not too much in evidence. But to 

 appreciate some of the salient features of the route tra- 

 versed the geological formations crossed, the changes 

 which have left the contours as we now see them, the 

 vegetable life which has helped to make the surface what 

 it is we must go over the ground more slowly. 



Let us mount the hill at St Clair and, before again 

 setting out along the high ground, sit down on the 

 greensward, and, with our outlook towards the mid-day 

 sun, survey the landscape before us. Surely it is one 

 of the fairest that we can look upon in this fair land. 

 Away to our right lies the illimitable stretch of the 

 well-named Pacific Ocean, its waves lapping the foot of the 

 basaltic cliffs which form the Forbury Head, now still and 

 blue reflecting the deep vault of the heavens, now dark 

 and sombre as the clouds throw their heavy shadows over 

 it, and then again green and white-topped as the fresh 

 breeze tosses its waters in the bright and uncertain glory 

 of a summer's day. There is monotony in the roll and 

 ripple of the sea, but it is an unwearied and unwearying 

 monotony, always the same in its rising and falling and 

 yet protean in its unceasing movement. In front of us 

 stretches "the long low dune and lazy plunging sea," 

 the line of beach and sandhills reaching to Lawyer's Head 

 and the foot of the Peninsula Hills, whose bold sea front is 

 formed of cliffs nearly similar to those under our feet. 

 These sandhills mark the rise of the coast line as they have 

 been slowly gained from the sea by the blowing inland 

 of the sand from off the reaches exposed at low water. 

 Again and again have the waves tried to win them back, 

 the wild waters beating at their base and sweeping masses 

 of them under their dominion, but all in vain ; the coast is 

 slowly rising, and we see repeating itself here, as elsewhere 

 in all this neighbourhood, the gradual building up of a 

 sand barrier which some day may harden into a rock as it 

 is already doing on the Lawyer's Head. 



