232 
the house or premises of a farmer; and it is curious to observe 
how the shrewder amongst the settlers, without any geological 
knowledge, and without dreaming even that they were building 
their houses at the very brink of a crater, have long since picked 
all those tuff-craters for themselves. The meadows and clover-fields 
upon them are proudly waving in softest verdure, while upon the 
sterile clay-soil nothing but ferns and manuka-bushes are strutting. 
With the beginning of the volcanic action , by which the tuff- 
cones were formed, a slow and gradual upheaving of the whole 
Isthmus seems to have taken place, so that the latter eruptions were 
supra-marine. In this second period the volcanic action caused the 
ejection of glowing masses of scoriae and cinders (Tapi Hi”), and of 
fiery fluid drops of lava (“volcanic bombs”), which from the rotatory 
motion through the air assumed the pear or lemon-shaped form 
peculiar to them; and finally great out-flowings of lava-streams 
took place, which were rolling their glowing waves, like rivers of 
fire, through the valleys. At that period the Auckland volcanoes 
were “burning mountains” in the true sense of the word; they were 
piling up their steep-rising scoria or cinder-cones; and, where re- 
peated and frequent out-flowings of lava from the same crater were 
taking place, there also lava-cones like the Eangitoto formed them- 
selves. 
It was not on all points of eruption , that cinders and lava 
came bursting forth, but at several points the first formation of 
the simple tuff-crater remained, and the volcanic forces afterwards 
opened new channels. But where the new eruptions followed the 
old channel, there we observe in the middle of 
the flat tuff-crater , the outer slope of which 
hardly ever rises at an angle larger than 5 to 
10 degrees, a steep cinder-cone with a decli- 
vity of 30 to 35 degrees, and a deep, funnel- 
shaped crater at the top. The cinder-cone very 
Tuff and Cinder-cone. n, 
oiten lias entirely riled up and even covered up 
the tuft-crater, as is, for example, the case with the Takapuna, 
the North Head of the Auckland Harbour; or it rises in the shape 
