642 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 



LXXXYII. — Repoet on a Jotjeney among the New Zealand Glaciers 

 IN 1882. By Eey. W. S. Green, M.A. (With Plate XVIII.) 



[Eead, June 26, 1882.] 



The whole of New Zealand consists of a line of iipheaved stratified 

 rocks, modified in the northern portion by recent volcanic activity, and 

 in one or two other places showing traces of more ancient vulcanicity. 

 The axis of elevation runs from S.W. to N. E., and is cut across into 

 the ISTorth Island, South Island, and Stewart's Island, by Cook's and 

 Foveaux' Straits. In the South Island the mountains attain to their 

 greatest elevation, and for over one hundred miles the Southern Alps, 

 as they were named by Captain Cook, raise their peaks far above the 

 snow line, in no place for the whole of that distance descending to a 

 col or pass free from eternal snow and ice. Immense glaciers fill the 

 valleys, and the remains of still more gigantic glaciers are everywhere 

 to be met with. 



This chain, with its continuation north and south, seems to have 

 been upheaved in Jurassic times, and though it has experienced many 

 vicissitudes of upheaval and depression it has never since, according to 

 Professor Hutton, been submerged. These mountains are then of vastly 

 greater antiquity than their European rivals, and their long exposure 

 to the frosts and storms of ages is abundantly evidenced by the heaps 

 of loose splintered stones to which all except the higher peaks have 

 been reduced. 



The mountains lie close to the west coast; their western flanks 

 possess a humid climate (the rain-fall at Hokitika being measured at 

 118 inches), and are clothed with forest and impenetrable scrub. 

 The western glaciers in some places descend to within 670 feet of 

 the sea, and the rivers are short and swift. This low descent of 

 the glaciers and the mean line of perpetual snow being at about 

 5000 feet compared with 8000 in Switzerland, where also no glacier 

 descends to within 4000 feet of the sea, is particularly instructive, 

 when we consider that these Southern Alps are at about the same 

 distance from the Equator as the Pyrenees and the city of Florence. 

 To the east of the mountains the land drops suddenly to a level 

 of about 2000 feet above the sea, and then by gentle slopes and 

 immense flat bare plains sinks gradually to the coast. The con- 

 tinuity of the plains is broken by ridges of low rounded hills, which 

 on close examination often prove to be old moraine accumulations; 

 while many of the plains are the basins of ancient lakes, the old 

 shores being very sharply defined. In the southern and northern 

 portions of the South Island the arrangement of mountains and plains 

 is considerably modified by the splitting up and bifurcation of the 

 main axis of elevation, but flat plains extending to the very foot of 

 the highest peaks of the main chain are most characteristic of New 

 Zealand, and totally unlike other mountainous countries, where ranges 



