Canterbury and Westland. 379 



Turning towards the Arctic regions, we find that amongst others the 

 Iceblink Glacier on the shores of Greenland advances into the sea, 

 forming a promontory 13 miles in length. A submarine bank formed 

 of morainic accumulations in the shape of a semicircle lies a few 

 hundred yards in front of it; only occasionally blocks of rocks or 

 debris in larger masses are scattered over the surface of this remark- 

 able glacier. Its thickness is estimated at 5000 feet, and thus the ice 

 grinding upon its bed with prodigious force must form silt in enormous 

 quantities. Judging from the observations made upon the mountains 

 in the Polar regions, also during our Great Glacier period, by far the 

 greatest portion of our Southern Alps was doubtless covered with, 

 perpetual snow, so that the New Zealand Glacier period, in order that 

 such an immense quantity of morainic matter could be transported 

 must have been of very long duration. Taking all these facts into 

 consideration, there is nothing startling in the assumption, that 

 in the height of that period in New Zealand, the West Coast 

 glaciers advanced the same distance into the sea as the Iceblink 

 Glacier does at the present time ; an assumption forced upon us when 

 we consider the character of the deposits between the morainic accu- 

 mulations forming the coast line. Thus, whilst the nature of the beds 

 formed during the Great Glacier period along the east base of the Alps, 

 where they are not destroyed or covered by fluviatile deposits, clearly 

 indicates that they could not have been formed during a submergence 

 of the land, the western morainic accumulations and the littoral beds 

 between them go far to prove that no considerable rising of the land 

 could have taken place ; in fact, it appears that the same relations of 

 land and sea obtained then, as we find them at present. I may here 

 observe that as far back as 1867, in a paper read before the Geological 

 Society of London, I proposed that the Ice age of New Zealand should 

 be named the Great Glacier epoch, whilst in a former paper read 

 before the same Society on January 15, 1865, I brought forward 

 many reasons to show that the climatic conditions of that period 

 must have been nearly the same as they are now, a conclusion con- 

 firmed by Captain Hutton, who from the examination of a number of 

 pleistocene and pliocene fossil shells, drew the inference that the 

 otlimate during those times was not colder than it is now. (See Captain 

 Button's Paper " On the Cause of the Former Greater Extension of 

 the Glaciers in New Zealand," Transactions N,Z. Institute, Vol. 

 Till, page 383 and sequ.) He has also followed my example and 

 adopted the name of Glacier Period for the era during which the New- 

 Zealand glaciers reached their greatest dimensions. 



