The Queensland -Naturalist. Vol. I. 
THE NAME “ GLASS HOUSES.” 
By David Owen, M.A. 
Mr. John Shirley, in his address on the Geology of the 
Glass House Mountains, before the Royal Society of Queens- 
land in 1907, offered the suggestion that those remarkable 
hills had been so named by Captain Cook from their “ ap- 
parent resemblance to glass palaces that he had seen in 
England.” The suggestion was one that set me thinking, 
for during that very period I was studying a cluster of 
place-names, of which Glass House was of the number, 
with a view to discovering their meaning. The explanation 
that rewarded my study then is one that dii'ers from Mr. 
Shirley’s, — but I can understand that while it was with 
the geology of the hills he was mainly concerned, he had 
meant that he should be taken as speaking only casually 
when offering an opinion as to their meaning. I have 
examined those place-names often since, and with the 
same result, so that I venture now to submit it for the 
eonsideration of other students. 
While all the world knows that Yorkshire was Captain 
Uook’s native county, not many know that his birth- 
place is named Marton, and that it is situated on the north- 
ern edge of the Cleveland Moors. These facts are for the 
purpose now in hand, specially to be noted, as it is with 
reference to them that Cook must have given to those two 
objects in the geography of our part of the world, that are 
so familiar to us, their present names Glass Houses and 
Moreton Bay. 
Now, the Cleveland Moors, like many other out-of- 
the-way j)l^ces in Britain which have been left in their 
almost primeval state, still exhibit the ruined remains 
of the ancient population that long ago inhabited them ; 
the most conspicuous of such remains being the more or 
less elevated tumuli and barrows that the old folk had 
used for burial purposes and for habitation, A century and 
a half ago, they could still show the outlines of their early 
form, and they stood almost undiminshed as to their original 
height. From the front seat of the old stage-coach, as it 
rounded the shoulder of a hill or clattered along the level 
moorland road, the traveller saw scores of these hillocks 
on either hand in groups of three or more, standing moveless 
and silent in the middle distance or glimmering faintly on 
the far horizon. 
The name given to them by the people of the locality 
is hones or howes. Of these names the singular hone is a 
softened form of the Danish word hang, which means a 
burial-mound; a few of them may be enumerated, such 
as Blakhowe, Glashoue, Brownhowe, Threehoues, and 
