V.—GEOLOGY. 
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ART. LVI. —On the Date of the Last Great Glacier Period in New Zealand. 
By Capt. F. W. Hurron, F.G.S. 
[Read before the Wellington Philosophical Society, 18th September, 1872.] 
Ir is an acknowledged fact that the glaciers of the South Island of New 
Zealand have been at some former time of much larger dimensions than they 
are at present, and to the period of their greatest extension Dr. Haast has 
applied the term “ Glacier Period.” This term is a very convenient one, and 
T shall here adopt it with the understanding, however, that it has no relation 
to, and implies no contemporaneity with, the “Glacier Epoch” of the Northern 
Hemisphere; for although Dr. Hector (Geo. Mag.,” 1870, p. 70; N.Z. 
Exhibition Jurors’ Reports, p. 263; Trans. N.Z. Inst., IL, p. 372; “Quar. 
Jour. Geo. Soc.,” 1865, p. 128 ; and Anniversary Address to the Well. Phil. 
Soc., 1872), and Dr. Haast (Formation of the Canterbury Plains, pp. 7, 14, ete.) 
refer our last glacier period to pleistocene times, that is to about the same 
time as the glacial period of Europe, I think I shall be able to show that it 
is in reality far older, or at any rate that the subject is one that admits of 
discussion. : 
‘No New Zealand geologist advocates now a cold or glacial period to 
account for the former extension of our glaciers, for, as Dr. Hector has 
pointed out in his anniversary address for this year, there are no signs of any 
till or marine formed boulder-drift to be seen, and our pleistocene and newer- 
pliocene fossils show that no very great reduction of temperature has occurred 
in these latitudes since those times*. In the pleistocene deposits of Wanganui 
we find Triton spengleri, Cassis pyrum, and another extinct species of the 
same genus, Ancillaria australis, Turbo granosus, Imperator imperialis, 
Rotella zealandica, and Labio zealandicus, as well as Mesodesma chemnitzir 
and M. cuneata, none of which probably would have been able to survive a 
reduction of temperature sufficient to cause so ee an extension of our 
glaciers as we know to have taken place. 
In the newer-pliocene beds which form the lower series at Wanganui 
(Geo. Reports, 1872, p. 182) we also find a Typhis, the same extinct species of 
* It can by no means be inferred from this that there has been no ‘‘ Glacial Epoch” 
in the Southern Hemisphere, for no glacial (as distinguished from glacier) phenomena are 
found in Europe south of 50°, and it is probable that if no land now existed north of tha 
parallel of latitude the occurrence of a glacial epoch would never have been 
