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natives Ta-oni-roa, or the Long Sand. The entrance is 
commanded by high and steep white cliffs, whilst the low 
shores of the Horse-shoe Bay are covered with white sand, 
beyond which the country is diversified with wooded hills 
and valleys.” 
The foot print from this place is upon a light and friable 
sandstone, it measures fully 9 inches from the heel to the 
tip of the claw of the middle toe and is 8 inches in width at 
the broadest part of the tread, the depth of the impression at 
the heel is quite one inch, and also the end joint of the 
middle toe is deeply impressed ; it gives one the notion of a 
bird walking over firm but wet sand, after the sand is 
treated with nitric acid, and repeated washing with filtered 
water, so as to get rid of the fine white sediment, the resi- 
due, about five sixths, shows under the microscope a curious 
sand made up entirely of jagged splinters of transparent 
and opaque quartz and felspar, with fine grains of black 
magnetic iron and schorl meagerly scattered in the mass. 
There is not a trace of lime or of alumina, the sandstone is 
crumbly and so friable that it is a wonder how the footprint 
was ever preserved. No doubt it was preserved by being 
covered with blown sand soon after it was made, and time 
has set the quartz splinters in a finely divided powder of 
felspar. 
The author exhibited the bones of a leg and foot of 
Dinornis Casurinus’* from peat beds on the Canterbury 
Plains, and a number of bones of the Dodo, exhumed from 
fine black mud by his brother Mr. Francis Plant in 1869, 
near Port St. Louis, Mauritius. 
“Upon Specimens from the Fresh Water Deposits of La 
Limagne d’ Auvergne in Central France,” by Mr. Makk 
Stireup, F.G.S. 
The author referred to the district as one of great interest 
both to geologists and palaeontologists, and one made famous 
