132 Transactions. 
Since this late Tertiary and Pleistocene climax of block-movement of 
the crust extensive erosion has taken place; the covering of Cretaceous 
and Tertiary sediments on the harder pre-Cretaceous greywackes, &c., 
f relatively little resistance, has, for the most part, been removed 
e higher blocks, but remains in the relatively depressed coastal 
ect uk and also in a series of intermontane basins, where it ma 
covered by the fluviatile gravels derived from the highlands (Cotton, 
op. cit.; Speight, 1915). This recalls in a striking manner the main 
topographic features of Celebes described above. The latest crust- 
movements have been in the nature of broad regional warpings, depression 
or uplift moving equally aggregates, s many of the smaller fault-bounded 
blocks, producing features of coa drowning or elevation, with con- 
sequent revival of river-valleys. The origins of the earthquakes felt in 
New Zealand (with a few exceptions—e.g., the Cheviot earthquake and 
the recent Taupo, Wellington, and North Canterbury shocks) are situated 
not within the land area, but some distance seaward to the east (Hogben, 
1914, 1918). 
n a previous paper (Benson, 1923, рр. и. the tectonic iip 
of New Zealand and Antarctica has been discussed, and support given 
to the view of Mawson (1911), Gregory (1912), Wilckens (1917), and Kober 
(1921) that the continuation of the south-easterly trend-lines of Otago 
will be found in King Edward VII Land and Graham Land, and form part 
of the folded margin of the Pacific Ocean basin, the continuity of which 
in Upper C times is indicated by an extremely uniform littoral 
Senonian fauna. urtherance of this it may be pointed out that there 
seems a marked similarity in age and petrographical character between 
the largely dioritic, more or less gneissic rocks of south-western New 
Zealand and the patio batholiths that are so characteristic of the 
Antarctandes of Graham Land, the Andes proper, and the coast ranges 
of British Columbia. Since Upper Cretaceous times, however, the 
bordering land-masses of this oceanic littoral have been broken up by 
fracture-systems, the most marked of which, in the New Zealand region, 
cross the old trend-lines obliquely, running in a north-north-easterly to 
the subsided region formin ng Ross Sea, and the shaping of the general 
outline of New Zealand, excluding that of the North Auckland Peninsula, 
which is due to other fracture- -systems. On this conception the New 
Zealand-Kermadee ridge would appear rather more as a complex fault-horst 
rising from an extensive submerged platform than as a fold-anticline. 
Brouwer, however, points out that a geanticline growing at depth is 
represented at the surface by a fractured ridge, often marked by a line of 
volcanoes, and separated from a foredeep by a steep submarine slope 
beneath which earthquakes originate. These are features exhibited to some 
extent by the Kermadec ridge and Tongan trough, from which the lines 
of voleanic and seismic activity may be traced respectively southwards 
into the centre, and off the east coast of the North Island of New Zealand. 
If New Zealand be regarded as the apex of a virgation, it appears to have 
become more or less stabilized and continental in character in the broad, 
g 
structure of which was summarized in a preceding paper (Benson, 1923, 
The imer activity jncreases northwards into the separate arcs. 
Andrews (1922, p. 20) remarks that the arcs become continental and 
confluent at their southern extrémity. This appears to have been the case 
also at an earlier epoch, for the evidence of crust-movement viens early 
