Cocxsurn-Hoop.—New Zealand a Post-glacial Centre of Creation. 19 
1869 the writer visited the great Tasman Glacier on the eastern flank of 
Mount Cook, which 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 60 to 80 feet, ** coming from 
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 previously, when the ice had retreated nearly 
half a mile, the river issued in two streams from under the lateral moraine 
on either side of the glacier. A local glacial period was commencing, the 
operations of which became suspended 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, would be proposed to have 
been included in the narrow zone amidst universal ice, the crowded Alsatia 
where ape-like men contended with men-like apes and divers other creatures 
with 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 VIIL., by Mr. Froude. 
Instead of engaging the attention of enquirers or allaying their scruples, 
such facetious proposals 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 Haéckel assumes a tone of contemptuous pity 
towards those persons who refuse to profess their absolute faith in the 
irrational dogma that the primordial forms were endowed with hfe and the 
power of propagation of their own instance. Considering that ** what we 
