November 14, 1907] 



NA TURE 



37, 



collects its own drinking water from a comparatively 

 pure source, and then adopts the selfish policy of per- 

 mitting its refuse matter to enter the stream below 

 its own intake, with loo little regard for the needs 

 of its neighbour lower down the course of the same 

 river. Perhaps it is hardly to be expected that, of its 

 own initiative, a sanitary authority will face a great 

 deal of extra trouble and expense (beyond what is 

 necessarv for its own purposes) in conserving the 

 qualitv and quantity of water when the entire benefit 

 is to be reaped by other authorities ; and this is one 

 0/ the reasons why a general policy should be adopted 

 and enforced by a central authority. 



Although certain river conservancy boards exist and 

 have done good work, and several county councils have 

 done much to reduce the contamination of streams, 

 these bodies are unable to do all that is necessary. The 

 Rivers Pollution Prevention Act of 1876 was not 

 framed so as to render the assistance which such 

 an Act could be made capable of, and most of our 

 larger rivers course through more than one county 

 or between the existing purely arbitrary boundary of 

 counties. " The rivers and watersheds of the country 

 are, moreover, generallv too extensive to be embraced 

 by any existing sanitary authority. 



The case in favour of putting the whole of the 

 watershed areas under one controlling authority is 

 therefore a very strong one. The matter, both in its 

 magnitude and importance, is clearly a national one, 

 and a central authority for the whole country is what 

 is needed. The duty of such an authority would be 

 to maintain a sufficient sanitary supervision and con- 

 trol over authorities whose districts form important 

 catchment areas for our water supplies, with the view 

 of maintaining the purity and volume of the waters 

 at standards sufficient to meet the domestic and trade 

 demands of the country as a whole. Such an 

 authority would also arbitrate and advise upon points 

 in dispute between sanitary authorities, or between 

 sanitary authorities and local industries — in so far as 

 these matters relate to the contamination of water; 

 and the heavy expenditure now entailed bv costly and 

 often ill-advised litigation, frequentlv leading to un- 

 satisfactory results, would more than pav for the 

 expert handling of matters in dispute by the central 

 authority. 



There can be no difference of opinion upon the 

 fact that the central authority in this matter should 

 be the Local Government Board; and in the legis- 

 lation which it is sought to promote certain powers 

 in the above-mentioned direction would be given to 

 that Board, and, in addition, measures are intro- 

 duced to protect the public health against the pollution 

 of shell-fish. 



^[r. Burns received the deputation in a most sym- 

 pathetic spirit, and expressed the hope of being able 

 fo introduce a Bill, dealing with matters referred to 

 by the deputation, in the spring of next year. 



SIR JAMES HECTOR, F.K.S. 

 r^E.XTH has removed the last of the four distin- 

 L^ guished geologists, F. von Hochstetter, Sir 

 Julius von Haast, F. W. Hutton and Sir James 

 Hector, who together laid the main foundations of 

 the geology of the Dominion of New Zealand. 



Sir James Hector was born in Edinburgh on March 

 16, 1S54, and was the son of Alexander Hector, a 

 Writer to the Signet. He was educated at the Edin- 

 burgh .\cademy and University, where he matriculated 

 in 1S5:!. took his detrrce of M.D. in 1S56, and served 

 as assistant to Edward Forbes and to Sir James 

 Simpson. His knowledge of natural historv .''nd 

 medicine, and the influence of Murchison, gained him 

 the post of surgeon and naturalist to Captain 



NO. 1985. \oL. yy] 



Palisser's expedition to the Rocky Mountains of' 

 British North America. The expedition was in thci 

 field from 1S57 to i860, and its best known result was 

 the discovery of the pass by vvhich the Canadian 

 Pacific Railway now crosses from the Great Plains of 

 Canada to the Pacific coast, .^t the close of the ex- 

 pedition Hector visited the gold-fields of California 

 and northern Mexico, and he reported upon the coal 

 mines of Vancouver Island. On his return to Scot- 

 land he wrote a series of papers on the botany, 

 ethnography and physical geography of the Canadian 

 Rocky Mountains, and a paper, of modest length, 

 " On the Geology of the Country between Lake 

 Superior and the Pacific Ocean (between 48° and <6° 

 N. lat.). ..." 



In the year of his return from America he vvas 

 appointed geologist to the Government of Otago, and 

 there began the main work of his life. He 

 made extensive and arduous journeys through the 

 province of Otago, which stijl contains the least 

 known and most difficult country in New Zealand. 

 .Some of his results were given in 186-5 in -i New Zea- 

 land Parliamentary Paper on " .An Expedition to the 

 North-west Coast of Otago," in which he described 

 the discovery of the pass from Martin's Bav to Lake 

 Wakatipu. His success in Otago soon gained Hector 

 promotion from a provincial to a federal appointmefit. 

 He was made one of the Commissioners for the New ' 

 Zealand exhibition at Dunedin in 1865, in prepar- 

 ation for which he made a tour through the colony 

 to report on its economic resources; and in the same 

 year he was appointed director of the Geological Sur- 

 vey of New Zealand and of the New Zealand Colonial 

 Museum at Wellington. There, or in his cottage on 

 the Hutt, a few miles away, he lived for more than 

 forty years. During the first half of this time he 

 issued a long series of important contributions to the 

 natural science of New Zealand ; their range was 

 wide, for he was director of the zoolosrical museum, 

 the botanical gardens, the meteorological observ- 

 atory, and the colonial laboratory, as well as of the 

 Geological Survey. He was also for many years 

 Chancellor of the New Zealand L'niversity. He 

 nevertheless found time for extensive original re- 

 searches. He wrote papers on glacial geology, the 

 origin of the rock basins and the volcanic historv of 

 New Zealand ; his zoological researches were mainlv 

 on the Cetacea, seals, and fish, and he wrote on many 

 groups of New Zealand fossils, notablv the moas, and 

 o,i the discovery of the oldest known penguin, 

 Pateeudyptes. He superintended and edited those 

 valuable series of annual reports issued by the Colonial 

 Museum and by the Geological Survey, beginning in 

 1S67, which are the great storehouse of information 

 on New Zealand geology. In 1868 he married the 

 eldest daughter of the late Sir David Monro, who 

 was then Speaker of the New Zealand Parliament. 

 In 1873 he issued a sketch-map of New Zealand 

 geology, of which the edition issued in 1886, with 

 his " Outlines of New Zealand Geologv," is still the 

 best available. In 1870 he compiled an official 

 " Handbook of New Zealand," a work of reference 

 of permanent value, of which a fourth edition was 

 issued in 1886. In that year he also wrote his well- 

 known report on the eruption of Tarawera ; he main- 

 tained that it was not a normal volcanic, but a hydro- 

 thermal eruption, due to a vast explosion of the super- 

 heated steam with which the ground around Lake 

 Rotomahana was saturated. This view has not been 

 confirmed for the eruption of Tarawera as a whole, 

 but it is probably correct for the particular explosion 

 which blew up Lake Rotomahana and its famous 

 pink and, white terraces. 



Hector's work had meanwhile gained world-wide 

 recognition. He had been elected a Fellow of the 



