THE NEW ZEALAND SOUND BASINS 23 



ing the canyons in their intricate windings to the points where stream 

 corrasion has destroyed the individuaHty of the plateau, one finds a 

 ceaseless repetition of contracted waterways, tortuous channels, and 

 myriads of overlapping spurs. Above all, the absence of lakes and 

 the wonderful constancy of the "graded" water-courses were marked 

 features. 



The first sight of the New Zealand fiords and the Alpine lakes was 

 marvelously contrasted to Australian scenic types, where glaciation 

 had had no part in determining the valley contours. Here (in New 

 Zealand) were great rock basins, broad flat-bottomed valleys, with 

 bordering walls rectilinearly disposed as to their bases, and of even 

 dip, but of such steepness as to be inaccessible to any but daring 

 climbers; a marked absence of spurs; and an arrangement of such 

 valley buttresses that they appeared shriveled up to the canyon 

 walls, their terminations ending in tremendous precipices, the bases 

 of the same being usually in alignment. Here also one saw lines of 

 sentinelling domes rising thousands of feet into the air — a prevalence 

 of rock monuments suggestive of sitting lions — and numerous deep 

 and fairly broad-bottomed canyons connecting with the sounds and 

 larger valleys over gigantic walls flush with the main rectilinear 

 ramparts. These remarkable side valleys, seen from below, appeared 

 to spring direct through U-shaped notches in the vertical walls. In 

 the crystalline schists these walls were at times almost monotonously 

 majestic- in their steepness and evenness of slope, as in Milford, 

 while in the softer schists of Wakatipu the valleys were broader, the 

 slopes less, and the "hanging valleys" a minor feature. Then 

 again there were the gigantic moraines of the lakes; and, perhaps 

 most striking of all, the wondrous cirques or amphitheaters, thou- 

 sands of feet in height, which, in the denser rocks, almost prohibit 

 the scaling of divides. 



No one form just enumerated found a response in the stream- 

 developed contours of the eastern Australian cordillera. The fact 

 was, moreover, well established that this fiord and lake land had 

 been demonstrated, by many workers, to have been one of former 

 intense glaciation, and as such an attempt was made by the writer 

 to furnish a glacial solution to the problem. While still puzzling 

 over the "hanging valleys," Professor W. M. Davis' note on glacial 



