112 Transactions. — Miscellaneous. 



marine origin in the sections at the gorges of the rivers, unless below where 

 some remnant of the abraded and buried tertiaries has remained and is exposed ; 

 nor seen evidence of the gradual subsidence in the remains of the successive 

 forests which have flourished, and been overwhelmed in their turn by the 

 streams of stones and other fluviatile deposits, which general subsidence, if it 

 is now arrested, has been so but at a comparatively recent date. Even totara, 

 durable as it is, will not remain for geological eras unchanged. Submerged 

 forests of this timber in good preservation are to be seen in the North Island, 

 where the land is broadest, near Wairoa, on the East Coast, and immediately 

 opposite between TJrenui and the Waitara rivers. 



Art. VIII. — Xotes uj^on the 2^^ohabls Changes that have taken 2^l(f-ce in the 



Physical Geogra2?hy of New Zealand since the Arrival of the Maori. 



By T. H. CocKBURN-HooD, F.G.S. 



[Head be/ore the Wellington Philosophical Society, 20th August, 1874.] 



In a paper upon the subject of the recent existence of the Moa I some years 

 ago ventured to state my opinion that if the theory of its extinction before 

 the coming of the Maori be accepted, a very great age must be accorded to 

 the singularly well-preserved remains of those great birds, as from many of 

 the traditions of this people we are led to the conclusion that tUe date of the 

 first landing of their forefathers on these shores is much more remote than 

 generally supposed. 



It may have been that as well as possessing a knowledge of comparative 

 anatomy which enabled them to determine to what order of animals the huge 

 bones they found belonged, the Maori fathers were also acute geologists, but 

 it seems more likely that the poetical story of the quarrel between the 

 three brother gods of the volcanoes of Kuapehu, Tongariro, and Taranaki, 

 and the flight of the latter down to the plain which now beai*s his name, 

 tearing up as he fled the deep gorge of the Whanganui River, the taking 

 of the remarkable truncated cone of Rangitoto from the lake on the 

 northern shore of Auckland liarbour, and other similar legends, have 

 reference to memories of great disturbances witnessed by their ancestors at 

 nearer and more remote ei)ochs. Such as that when a violent eruption of 

 Mount Egmont took place, and the altitude of its cone was increased, 

 and when the peak of the third great volcano of the group that once stood 

 upon " that huge flat cone," tlio sterile pumice-stone plateau of Taupo sank 

 down into the depths of the geyser-circled lake, as Arid Island has done in the 

 Ilauraki Gulf, or was blown up as Papandayang was in the last centuiy, 



