Wellington Philosophical Society. 373 



New Zealand and the other Australasian colonies are directly interested in 

 the successful carrying out of this proposal, and although the appliances required 

 are quite beyond the means of the colony to supply, yet an expression of 

 interest in the effort would greatly strengthen the hands of those who desire to 

 see such an expedition organized. Merely as a commercial venture the further 

 examination of the southern lands might lead to valuable results, on account 

 of the extensive deposits of guano, which are described by Sir James Ross as 

 having been forming for ages, and which, he surmises, may at some future 

 period be valuable to the agriculturists of the Australasian colonies; and he also 

 draws attention to the great extent of undisturbed whaling ground, in which 

 whales of several different species abound in great numbers. 



The paper by Captain Hutton, on the date of the last great glacier period 

 in New Zealand, discusses a subject upon which there is room for great 

 difference of opinion, owing to the complicated manner in which many 

 subordinate questions have been mixed up with it. I gather that the author 

 disagrees from the opinion expressed in my last address, that there has been a 

 general subsidence of the New Zealand area, on a grand scale, during the post- 

 pliocene or post-glacier period ; and that, on the other hand, the whole evidence 

 is in favour of elevation during the pleistocene period. His argument chiefly 

 rests on the assumption that terraces prove elevation, but I may point out 

 that, with reference to the Waikato basin, he asserts that it has never been 

 elevated more than 50 feet above the sea, and yet its main tributary valley, the 

 Waipa, has, according to Hochstetter, a most remarkable development of 

 terrace formations. 



But it appears to me that, with a general subsidence of the mountain 

 centres, inequalities of movement are quite compatible, and in this way the 

 elevation of post-pliocene marine deposits at Wanganui, which is in the centre 

 of a great tertiary plain, affords no proof of the elevation of mountain masses 

 at a distance of many hundred miles. The rigidity of the earth's crust, which 

 such an argument would imply, is indeed quite opposed to Captain Hutton's 

 own views in the lucid and thoughtful lecture on the causes which have led to 

 the elevation of mountain chains, another valuable contribution by him to 

 the current volume of the Transactions of the Institute. Unless palpeontological 

 evidence of a more recent period can be obtained from strata occupying 

 valleys that were eroded during the last extension of the glaciers, I must still 

 adhere to my formerly-expressed opinion, that the geological period previous to 

 that which may be termed the recent period (not to be confounded with the 

 very short "human" period in New Zealand) was characterized by a prolonged, 

 though perhaps not excessive, elevation, and that, especially in the South Island 

 there is, in consequence, a marked absence of marine drifts and tills, and that 

 the subaerial deposits and fluviatile drifts of the former period still remain 



