270 Reviews— Geology of New Zealand. 
mouths at the gorges where they discharge their waters at the moun- 
tain-base; and that they have through a long period accummulated 
at least 80 feet of detritus in these plains. Old river-beds are 
traceable on the surface, each river having often changed its course. 
The Waimakariri has been most changeable, and for a long time 
seems to have been moving north, having within a comparatively 
recent period traversed the distance of about 28 miles,—between the 
Selwyn and its present course. These rivers are therefore only 
doing now what they have often done before, and will continue to do 
until the mountains wear into hills and downs. 
Mr. Doyne recommends a site for the bridge above where shingle 
and sand, raising the river-bed of the Rakaia, make it overflow; he 
recommends the overflow channel of the Rangitata to be left alone ; 
and he points out also that the Government had better leave Nature 
to work out her ends with the other river, and rather indemnify the ~ 
farmers of Kaiapoi year by year as the land goes, than waste money 
in making a railway bridge in a wrong place, and constructing useless 
works of great magnitude and certain failure. 
There are other points of interest shown by Mr. Doyne. The 
engineering plans referred to by him seem to show that the rivers 
first followed the lowest or level course through the plains, and that, 
as they have been choked with shingle, they have deviated at right 
angles to these lines of level courses, which are 25°-27° E. of mag- 
netic N. for the Rangitata and Rakaia, and 16° 30’ W. of magnetic 
N. for the Waimakariri. Hence the direction of future overflows 
can be indicated. Should the latter river break its south bank, it 
might seriously affect Christchurch ; but accurate levels have to be 
taken as a basis for calculations in this matter, and would add much 
to a knowledge of the river’s history. ‘The constant tendency of 
these rivers in their changes to go northerly would lead (Mr. Doyne 
thinks) to the conclusion that there has been a steady upheaval of 
the land in the neighbourhood of Banks’s Peninsula and south of it. 
Tue Grotocy or New ZEALAND. 
INCE 18438, when Dieffenbach’s ‘Travels in New Zealand’ 
were published, nearly every year has contributed some in- 
formation about the minerals and fossils of that country, and about 
its volcanoes, hot-springs, glaciers, gold-fields, and general geology. 
In 1859, the Austrian cireumnavigators, in the ‘ Novara,’ having 
visited New Zealand, one of them, Dr. F. von Hochstetter, was in- 
duced to spend some time in a special geological examination of 
the Provinces of Auckland and Nelson; and one portion of the 
results is given in his handsome quarto, ‘Geologie von Neu-Seeland: 
Beitrige zur Geologie der Provinzen Auckland und Nelson 
(Novara-Expedition, Geologischer Theil, I. Band, I. Abtheilung),’ 
1864, illustrated with six coloured geological maps, eight plates of 
views, and sixty-six woodcuts; whilst a Geological Atlas and 
Palzontological Memoirs (noticed in GrotocicaL Macazine, Vol. I. 
p. 78) are other portions of this noble work, divided among 
