430 Proceedings. 
the lake. It could not have been formed by a single continuous scooping 
process in the present line of the lake, as if a depression had not otherwise 
existed the upper part of the glacier wonld have continued its excavation 
towards the Te Anau Lake, in which direction there is a low saddle. The 
soundings of the lake, which is fifty miles long, were taken in 1863 under 
his instructions by Mr. Hacket, and showed that the bottom is flat from side 
to side, and has an average fall of twelve feet in the mile from both ends 
towards the middle arm, where the bottom of the lake is 300 feet below the 
sea-level. The resemblance to the sounds on the west is complete, yet they 
are only forty miles distant, and are cut to more than 1,800 feet beneath the 
sea-level, and in hard granite instead of the soft crumbling schists that are 
found round the Wakitipu. To explain this fact inequality of subsidence is 
certainly necessary ; moreover, the occurrence of marine tertiary limestone on 
the shore of the lake inclined at 50°, and rising to considerable altitudes in 
the mountains, indicates movements in the rock masses of the district that 
must have contributed to determine the direction of the vallies, 
The President supported Mr. Enys regarding the reports on the Canterbury 
plains by Dr. Haast and Mr. Doyne, and from his own knowledge said that 
nothing was more clearly established than the regularly curved contours of 
surface deposits concentric to the points where the great rivers emerge from 
the mountains. The existence of the terraces bounding the rivers as they 
cross the plains to the sea, he explained as being due to the gradual erosion 
of a notch in a rocky barrier where they leave the mountains, so that the 
river flows at a lower level, and cuts through its earlier formed alluvium. So 
far as the district of the Rakaia is concerned, the statement that the gravel 
formation wraps round the spurs of the hills at one uniform level is certainly 
not correct. On the whole, he thought no proof had been advanced of any 
submergence beneath the sea of the alpine districts since the last excavation 
of the great vallies by the glaciers. After quoting Sir Charles Lyell, who 
points out that the time required for similar excavation is so extensive that 
it covers a period during which we know that greater oscillations of level 
have taken place than are required to account for such inequalities, the 
President drew attention to the irregularity in the movement of the land 
during the earthquakes of 1848 and 1855, which amounted to nine feet 
elevation at Palliser Bay and was not perceptible at Porirua, while there is 
good reason to believe that in Blind Bay there was a marked depression. The 
elevation of the Bally Rock in Wellington harbour and the depression of the 
Hapuku Rock at the Astrolabe in Blind Bay, since. the publication of the 
Admiralty charts, was also advanced as evidence that unequal movements 
have taken place on a small scale, and of course such may be cumulative 
