Wellington Philosophical Society. 421 



found during this long period, the great duration of which may be judged of 

 from the fact that lake basins, 1,000 feet deep and 10 to 40 miles in length, 

 must have remained filled with ice, whilst the highest alpine vallies, contain- 

 ing many thousand times their cubic contents, were being excavated, and 

 the material being carried over them and distributed in the lower plains 

 outside the ranges, a feature which was first pointed out by Mr. Travers in 

 a paper describing the Rotoiti Lake district of Nelson, which was published 

 in the " Natural History Review," in 1864. 



Even if we resort to the neighbourhood of the sea-coast, where we might 

 expect to find distinct signs of emergence^ there the evidence is all in favour 

 of a general subsidence of the land on a great scale during the post-pliocene 

 period. 



Vallies that were eroded by the extended glaciers in the hardest rocks, 

 such as the sounds on the west coast of Otago, are now depressed far beneath 

 the level to which they could have been eroded, as their extent and depth have 

 no constant relation to the present area and altitude of the neighbouring 

 mountain ranges. 



In a similar manner, in the northern parts of New Zealand, where the 

 rocky framework of the islands forms the coast line, and in situations where 

 it has not been worn into precipitous clifis by the surf, the vallies are pro- 

 longed beneath the water-level in a most distinct manner, forming deep water 

 inlets and harbours, while the low shelving and sandy parts of the coast have 

 a heaped up shore line that appears as if encroaching on the alluvial deposits. 

 Except one raised beach — nowhere more than twenty feet above the sea-level, 

 and which distinctly marks an irregular elevation of the land that has chiefly 

 accompanied earthquakes since the first occupation of the islands by Europeans, 

 and which may be examined at almost any point of this harbour — there is a 

 total want of any inland cliffs, lines of sand-dunes, and ridges, and other 

 familiar evidences of an emerged coast line. 



The low country, where such evidence might reasonably be looked for, is 

 invariably formed of marine strata of higher antiquity than the period of the 

 extension of the glaciers, or of swamps that are either still exposed or have 

 been overwhelmed by shingle deposits brought from a higher level by the 

 rivers, as an example of which I need only refer to the sections which have 

 been obtained in boring for artesian wells in Christchurch and elsewhere, 

 which pass through shingle till they strike an old drift-wood bed at eighty to 

 ninety feet beneath the level of the sea. 



This peculiarity in the distribution of the alluvial deposits of the province 

 of Wellington, and the important indication afforded by the limited altitude 

 at which pumice drift is found in land-locked harbours not fed by streams that 

 float down pumice from the interior, was adverted to in an early paper to the 



