Wellington Philosophical Society. 373 
New Zealand and the other Australasian colonies are directly interested in 
the successful carrying out of this proposal, and although the appliances required 
are quite beyond the means of the colony to supply, yet an expression of 
interest in the effort would greatly strengthen the hands of those who desire to 
see such an expedition organized. Merely as a commercial venture the further 
examination of the southern lands might lead to valuable results, on account 
‘of the extensive deposits of guano, which are described by Sir James Ross as 
having been forming for ages, and which, he surmises, may at some future 
period be valuable to the agriculturists of the Australasian colonies; and he also 
draws attention to the great extent of undisturbed whaling ground, in which 
whales of several different species abound in great numbers, 
The paper by Captain Hutton, on the date of the last great glacier period 
in New Zealand, discusses a subject upon which there is room for great 
difference of opinion, owing to the complicated manner in which many 
subordinate questions have been mixed up with it. I gather that the author 
disagrees from the opinion expressed in my last address, that there has been a 
general subsidence of the New Zealand area, on a grand scale, during the post- 
pliocene or post-glacier period ; and that, on the other hand, the whole evidence 
is in favour of elevation during the pleistocene period. His argument chiefly 
rests on the assumption that terraces prove elevation, but I may point out 
that, with reference to the Waikato basin, he asserts that it has never been 
elevated more than 50 feet above the sea, and yet its main tributary valley, the 
Waipa, has, according to Hochstetter, a most remarkable development of 
terrace formations. 
But it appears to me that, with a general subsidence of the mountain 
centres, inequalities of movement are quite compatible, and in this way the 
elevation of post-pliocene marine deposits at Wanganui, which is in the centre 
of a great tertiary plain, affords no proof of the elevation of mountain masses 
at a distance of many hundred miles. The rigidity of the earth’s crust, which 
such an argument would imply, is indeed quite opposed to Captain Hutton’s 
own views in the lucid and thoughtful lecture on the causes which have led to 
the elevation of mountain chains, another valuable contribution by him to 
the current volume of the Transactions of the Institute. Unless paleontological 
evidence of a more recent period can be obtained from strata occupying 
valleys that were eroded during the last extension of the glaciers, I must still 
adhere to my formerly-expressed opinion, that the geological period previous to 
that which may be termed the recent period (not to be confounded with the 
very short “human” period in New Zealand) was characterized by a prolonged, 
though perhaps not excessive, elevation, and that, especially in the South Island 
there is, in consequence, a marked absence of marine drifts and tills, and that 
the subaerial deposits and fluviatile drifts of the former period still remain 
