﻿120 Transactions. — Miscellaneous. 



found in great numbers in Poverty Bay, in years gone by, many of tlie earliest 

 shipments to England having been sent from thence by the Rev. W. Williams, 

 now Bishop of Waiapu, in 1842 and the following yeax'S. These bones were 

 found by the natives generally in the river-beds, buried in the deep alluvial 

 deposit which covers the bottom of the valley. None, as far as I know, have 

 been found imbedded in the recent rocks, such as that in which the footprints 

 occur. I have found them myself in the bank of the Kopututea River, about 

 six feet below the surface, and I have also picked up a few on the beach at 

 Turanganui, within a short distance of the spot where the footprints are found, 

 but on the opposite side of the river. Whether these bones and the foocprints 

 belong to the same period is a qiiestion which it is not easy to determine. The 

 alluvial deposit, in which the bones have been found, covers the whole of the 

 lower portion of the valley, forming a plain of an irregular deltoid shape, the 

 base of the ti-iangle at the coast being about ten miles long, and the apex about 

 eight miles inland. Running through this plain there are two rivers, viz., the 

 Kopututea, which is formed by the confluence of the Waipaoa and the Aiai, 

 and occupies a middle position, rather towards the south-west side of the plain ; 

 and the Taruheru, which falls into the sea at Turanganui at the north-eastern 

 corner of the bay. The alluvial deposit, averaging about twenty feet in depth, 

 has been brought down mainly by the Waipaoa, the banks of which at the 

 upper part of the plain are thirty or forty feet high. It is very seldom now 

 that this river overflows its banks. The last instance of a flood, by which any 

 noticeable addition was made to the depth of the soil on the plain, was in 

 March, 1853, when the overflowing water found an outlet by running into the 

 Taruheru River, leaving behind it a deposit of several inches of mud. But such 

 an inundation had not been witnessed before by any of the natives then living, 

 ^nd as every year passes it becomes less likely that such a thing will occur 

 again, in consequence of the gradual deepening of the bed of the river. Such 

 inundations, however, must have been very frequent in early times, and as the 

 surface of the plain grew higher and the bed of the river became deeper, they 

 would come to be more and more rare, tUl, as now, they are almost entirely 

 unknown. The growth of the deposit, therefore, under which the bones were 

 buried, must have been very rapid at the beginning, gradually becoming slower, 

 untU at last it may be said to have ceased altogether. 



The time that would be required for the depositing of twenty feet of loam 

 by this river, and the circumstances under which the sUt at Turanganui has 

 hardened into stone, as well as the time that would be necessary for this 

 process, are matters which I do not venture to decide. 



Note. — The accompanying diagrams were made by drawing a straight line 

 by the side of each series of impressions, and taking measurements from it to 

 the heel and tips of the toes of each impression. The intervals between the 



