130 Historical Notes on the 



On Tuesday, March the 20th, we retraced our steps, and at noon on the 

 following day camped on the right hand hank of the Mathias, near its 

 junction. "When rounding the spur of the Arrowsinith range, the con- 

 trast, looking east and west, is very striking between the rugged character 

 of the Alps and the singularly -rounded outlines of the eastern ranges. 

 In the foreground and centre of the valley stands the characteristic 

 Double Hill ; above it appear the sugarloaf -shaped hills which 

 surround Lake Coleridge, and over all, the long flat Thirteen-mile bush 

 range bounds the horizon. Having observed shortly before, at the 

 Trancis Joseph glacier, on the western side of our Alps, how ice 

 perceptibly rounds and moulds the rocks in its way, not much imagin- 

 ation was required to fill again the v>hole valley with a sea of ice, 

 planing and furrowing those hills on a more gigantic scale. I may 

 here observe that 1500 feet above ACein Knob, which, according to 

 my calculation, lies 4137 feet above the sea, or 1083 feet above the 

 terminal face of the Ramsay glacier, numerous glacier shelves and 

 lateral moraines occur on the southern side of the mountain, which 

 slope down so regularly towards the east that I could take their angle, 

 which I found to be about 1 degrees on an average. Thus it appears that 

 the valley was here filled with ice at an altitude of nearly 6000 feet 

 above the sea, and yet this was certainly not during the greatest exten- 

 sion of the post-pliocene glaciers, judging from other phenomena 

 observed everywhere in still higher regions. 



I started on Thursday, March 22nd, to examine the sources of the 

 Mathias, the most important tributary of the Eakaia above the junction 

 of the Wilberf orce. Six miles from the junction of the Mathias with the 

 main river its hitherto broad shingle-bed narrows considerably, and a 

 moraine, 10 feet high, crosses the valley, through which the river has 

 broken a passage, exposing on the eastern side, its peculiar structure. 

 Thus the same phenomenon which I had observed during previous 

 explorations in some of the smaller tributaries of the Waitaki and 

 Eangitata occurs also here, pointing either to a temporary halt of the 

 retreating glaciers or to an advance of the present ones since the Great 

 ice period. The natural features of the country under consideration 

 would, in many instances, at least point towards the adoption of the 

 latter hypothesis. Behind this moraine the valley widens again con- 

 siderably, as in other rivers under similar conditions, and is filled with 

 a large shingle flat from side to side. Fagus forest, which hitherto 

 had prevailed on the lower side of the valley, ceases here, where the 

 river-bed attains an altitude of 2100 feet, and dense sub-alpine vege- 



