114 Transactions. — Miscellaneous. 



the several strata are lying with the utmost regularity possible. It was in the 

 upper portion of the bed of blue clay that the root was found embedded, 

 standing upright as if it had grown there, and the several small branches which 

 were found at the same place were of the same kind of timber, and bore plain 

 and distinct marks of the stone implement upon them. The inference to be 

 drawn is not only that the islands of New Zealand had been inhabited long 

 anterior to the migration of the Maoris to them, but that they had been 

 peopled before the extinct volcano in the neighbourhood of the present 

 Mechanics' Institute had begun to belch its mud torrents and streams of 

 melted lava. This conlusion seems to be inevitable, whether it be assumed 

 that the tree grew where the root and the implement of its destruction were, 

 or whether, as some incline to think, a river had run where the blue stratum 

 is found, and that the root had been carried from a distance to its resting place. 

 In either case the root must have been where it was found the other day, not 

 only before the volcanic matter was deposited on the Barrack Hill, but for a 

 sufficiently long period before that to permit a stratum of 8 tq 10 feet in 

 thickness to be deposited." 



The conclusion that the volcano was in a state of activity long after the 

 tree was felled seems beyond contradiction, but that the hand that used the 

 stone adze, with which it was laboriously cut down, was not that of a Maori 

 is by no means a sequitur. 



"With respect to the old trachytic volcano of Taranaki, whose far stretching, 

 symmetrically sloping buttresses, have guarded for vast ages from destruction 

 by the ocean the tertiary deposits which fringe its eastern and southern base, 

 and lie up to the flanks of Ruapehu and the ranges of the Ruahine and 

 Kaimanawa, as strata of similar age cling like coral reefs, Mr. Jukes says, to 

 those of the volcanic islands to the north of Australia, especially in the Timor 

 Sea, it appears quite possible that considerable changes in its contour may have 

 been witnessed by the remote progenitors of the present aborigines, at an era 

 not perhaps more distant than that when the second city built upon the same 

 spot was buried under the ashes of Vesuvius. Its crater not having sunk in 

 Mount Egmont does not present in a truncated cone the evidence of the changes 

 in its appearance since it and its loftier rival Ruapehu stood also, perhaps, 

 islands in the tertiary sea. From a platform, as described by Dr. DiefFenbach 

 at an elevation of about 5,800 feet above the sea the present crater cone rises 

 its cinders and slags of scoriaceous lavas cannot be distinguished in their 

 lithological character from those of the more recent eruptions of the volcanos 

 of Auvergne, which Mr. Scrope assigns to a date subsequent to the appearance 

 of man in that region. 



During the past summer there was less snow upon the mountain than has 

 ever been the case before since the settlement of New Plymouth was founded— 



