996 "Transactions. — Miscellaneous. 
couple of miles on both sides (at the Omapu stream, and near the Wanganui 
Heads) there were easy natural slopes leading right downto thebeach. There 
would be, also, no places in which canoes could be kept at the base of the 
cliffs, and theré are no rocks, on which people could stand to fish from the 
shore. The idea, therefore, of these places being fishing camps seems to me to 
be untenable, unless the coast line has been upheaved nearly 150 feet, and the 
cliffs formed, since such camps were in use; and though the Maoris have 
a tradition that, when their ancestors landed in the island, the Wanganui 
valley, for many miles above the town, was an arm of the sea, yet, an 
upheaval of 50 feet would suffice to change such a condition of the coast to 
its present one, and the age of the timber growing in the valley indicates 
that no such upheaval ever has occurred within far more than the period 
stated. I think, in fact, that this tradition, and others respecting geo- 
logical changes, are either Negretto ones—which have been handed down 
by the Maoris, rather than original Maori ones,—or that they show 
that some of the old Maoris had sufficient intelligence to perceive from 
the geological indications what changes must have taken place, and what 
must have been the state of certain localities at some previous, though 
possibly somewhat remote period, and that their pointing out this to their 
friends has caused the change to be handed down as a matter of history. 
Indeed, I see no other way of reconciling these traditions and the 
Maori genealogies (which last I believe to be in the main correct). Our 
first idea, too, as to the manner in which these deposits had been preserved 
(by being accidentally éovered up by sand) was, I think, erroneous. From 
having particularly noted the changes in the position of several sand-hills 
since 1851, I estimate that they travel at the rate of about a chain in ten 
years, and probably travelled more slowly when they had more vegetation 
on them, and were less traversed by animals. The area over which the 
circles of stones ‘at the first place which we examined are distributed ex- 
tends fully two chains in the direction in which the sand travels ; and it is, 
therefore in the highest degree improbable that the whole could have been 
covered by one season’s gales, particularly as the sand-hill is only of 
moderate height; and had the savages on their return on any occasion 
found the windward portion of their deposits buried, they would, I think, 
unquestionably have been careful not to bury further treasures so near the 
enemy. This would have caused large intervals to occur between different 
sets of deposits in the same locality. But no such interval exists. On the 
contrary, the circles are distributed over the whole area very uniformly, at 
distances of a few yards only asunder ; and this seems to me to show con- 
clusively that the covering up of the deposits was not accidental. The idea 
occurred to me that these places might have been camps used by Natives 
