CocKBURN-HooD. — XcH' Zealand a Posl-i/lacial Centre of Creation. lO 



18G9 tlie writer visited tlie great Tasmau Glacier on the easteru flank of 

 Mount Cook, wliicli then, as the Cashmere head of the Indus is represented 

 to do, issued from under the terminal foot of the glacier in one grand 

 foaming fountain, boiling up to a height of GO to 80 feet, " coming fi'om 

 under an arch,' lofty, gloomy and Avernus-like, a large ready-formed river, 

 whose colour was that of the soil collected at its source, rolling along 

 immense masses of ice, and whirling them against the rocks with the noise of 

 distant cannon." Some years jn-eviously, when the ice had retreated nearly 

 half a mile, the river issued in two streams from under the lateral moraine 

 on cither side of the glacier. A local glacial period was commencing, the 

 operations of which became susp,eudcd since the amount of ice borne off by 

 the antarctic current diminished again to its normal quantity, as it has 

 done lately, and dry seasons have returned in Australia threatening ruin to 

 the farmers and graziers. 



The more the subject is considered, and the effects observed of such 

 agencies, the less necessary does it appear to call in the aid of extraordinary 

 ones of which no traces are visible. 



Had there been a general ice-sheet covering New Zealand, its ancient 

 littoral marine fauna which still exist, its moas, and other apterous birds 

 must all have perished, and whence came again those forms of life from 

 which they were developed ? It is scarcely to be conceived that this far 

 island of the sea, situated in the latitude it is, w^ould be proposed to have 

 been included in the narrow zone amidst universal ice, the crowded Alsatia 

 Avhere ape-like men contended with men-like apes and divers other creatures 

 Avith their respective congeners, in the dire struggle for existence that took 

 place within its limited precincts, when the weakest, the least able to 

 consider and provide against the exigencies of the situation, perished. 



It is not enough to have events so stupendous, and others still more 

 startling, declared to have taken place at distances of time so enormous 

 that the consideration of them leaves but an indefinite impression upon the 

 mind, merely stated as facts, and related with an air of acknowledged 

 authenticity, as the stories of the reign of Henry VIII., by Mr. Froude. 



Instead of engaging the attention of enquirers or allaying their scruples, 

 such facetious }u-oposals are scarcely even calculated to afford as much 

 amusement as the extension of Mr. Darwin's paradox, in the allusion to the 

 correlation of old maids, mice, and roast beef. 



In his anxiety to prove the non-miraculous origin of the universe and 

 all things therein. Professor Haickel assumes a tone of contemptuous pity 

 towards those persons who refuse to profess then- absolute faith in the 

 irrational dogma that the primordial forms were endowed with life and the 

 power of propagation of their own instance. Considering that " what we 



