90 Transactions.—Miseellaneous. 
ridge is over five feet higher than the bare sandy portion, and is almost 
perpendicular (Plate II. Secs. 8 and 5). 
The gradations between the lower bare sandy ridge with its oblique face 
to the sea, and the higher verdure-clad ridge with its steep face to the sea is 
well observable, and, as our surmises received confirmation here, I describe 
the process as minutely as possible, for I wish you clearly to understand 
that these remains have been covered with sand and overgrown with thick 
littoral plants; and, since the oldest inhabitants knew nothing of these 
burying-places or camping-grounds, it is clear that these relics could not be 
observed till the surface had been removed and the old bed exposed to view. 
A small channel is formed in the outer face of the ridge, either by the 
tramping of cattle or the encroachment of the sea, or both, down which the 
sand will run, and through which the wind rushes like as through a funnel, 
and soon the space widens ; the sand is removed from the roots of the 
plants, the blowing sand cutting the leaves off, and the ridge is thus lowered 
in time to the bed of the old camping-ground. One of those small channels 
is already of considerable width, leaving on the sandy end a mound with a 
tuft of dying vegetation, its stringy roots hanging down all round. On the 
other end of this channel the face was steep, and a human skeleton was 
falling out of the bank; the skull had fallen out, but the other parts 
appeared in a horizontal position, with two feet of loose sand between the 
bones and pipi shells beneath (Plate IL, Sec. 5). We brought this skull to 
Auckland and marked it. Portions of two other human skeletons were 
exposed on the bare sandy end of the ridge. We could not discover any 
traces of the Moa in this spot. 
About two miles south-east, across the Taiharuru River, is a snug little 
cove, with ahorse-shoe beach one-third of a milein length, called by the Nova 
Scotians, Baleladech Bay (I failed to learn the native name); it is at the 
north end of the farm of Wm. M‘Leod, and close to his house, at the head 
of this bay, is a sandy ridge about 20 to 80 feet high, 100 yards long. 
Each end is bounded by soft clay rocks, with the sea on one side and a 
swamp of the Taiharuru River on the other. 
The blown sand here covers about four acres, and the present surface is 
literally strewn with human remains, I distinguished the heaps of bones 
belonging to 24 human skeletons, and I was shewn a spot where ten addi- 
tional had been covered up again with sand. Kitchen middens are 
heaps of shell-fish and tools. I obtained here some of the finest obsidian 
chips and one ill-formed adze. After very careful search I found 
embedded, in brown hardish sand, 
skeletons of two Moas, 
from the ten vertebra : 
