244 C. T. Trechmann — Glacial Controversy , New Zealand. 



drift and which has long been worked for gold, and there are other 

 outliers of a similar schistose conglomerate. In the Taieri Hills the 

 more or less bedded material dips west at various angles. Professor 

 Park states that the dip is towards the north-north-west for a distance 

 of 2 miles at angles of 10 to 33 degrees. Its thickness is also very 

 considerable, reaching apparently 1,500 feet. In addition to being- 

 tilted and faulted it has suffered prolonged erosion, and the deep 

 valley of the Taieri River has been cut right through it. 



The Dunedin-Invercargill railway skirts the western side of this 

 chain of hills for over 20 miles, and it forms a very conspicuous 

 feature of the topography. 



If these hills were glacial — and when plotted on a map the outline 

 of this rock certainly suggests in shape a great terminal moraine 

 stretching parallel to the coast for many miles — then there must 

 indeed have been a vast ice-sheet debouching from the Alpine region 

 towards the east coast. 



I am, however, convinced that they are not glacial. I visited the 

 locality in company with Professor Marshall with a view to seeing 

 this line of hills and of examining the sections exposed near Henley 

 and in the gorge of the Taieri Elver which cuts through the supposed 

 moraine. The material is almost, if not entirely, composed of schist ; 

 in places it is clearly current-bedded and sometimes very hard and 

 ■compact. Masses of a very big size do not seem to occur. Professor 

 Park says that pieces over 12 feet are exceptional, but the largest 

 I saw were much smaller than that. He also adds that no striated 

 boulders occur in it, and certainly I saw none. 



I was struck with the dissimilarity of this deposit to any glacial 

 moraine I had ever seen. Both this and the gold-bearing deposit of 

 Blue Spur near Lawrence in Otago are deposits of post-Jurassic age 

 and rest unconformable on the underlying mica-schist, but whether 

 they are associated with the late Cretaceous or with the Tertiary 

 periods of deposition must await further investigation. 



New Zealand geologists should be able to trace these schistose 

 conglomerates in some definite association with undoubted Cretaceous 

 or Tertiary deposits which should settle the question. Sir James 

 Hector and A.. McKay associated the Taieri deposits with the 

 brown-coal series of supposed early Tertiary age. 



There is evidence that the Henley or Taieri conglomerate mass is 

 faulted parallel to the Taieri basin, but the fault is nowhere seen. 

 The material at Blue Spur is certainly faulted, and the faults are 

 clearly revealed by the gold-sluicing operations. There are certainly 

 recent fault dislocations in New Zealand, but those at Blue Spur 

 appear to be of much earlier date than Pleistocene. 



The removal of these schistose faulted conglomerates of Eastern 

 Otago from the domain of glacial action removes also the chief 

 evidence for any pre-Pleistocene glaciation. The traces of the Alpine 

 glaciation are so fresh that any question of their being of Pliocene 

 age is excluded. 



Finally, as against the ice-sheet theory it may be mentioned that 

 the two masses of Tertiary volcanic rocks of the Otago and Banks 

 Peninsula on the east coast occupy a similar position relatively to 



