extremely remarkable kind of rock which has attracted the attention 
of every stranger travelling along the lake. It is a volcanic rock 
of a very striking, lamellar structure. Like the leaves of a book, 
sometimes of a microscopic fineness, the thin lamellar sheets of 
stone lie one above the other. Grayish black layers resembling 
silicious schist, of various lighter and darker shades, alternate with 
pearl-gray, violet flesh-coloured, sometimes even with brick-coloured 
layers, so that the streaky mass reminds the observer of agate. 
From the numerous, white, transparent quartz-grains, and small, 
yellowish-white felspar-crystals (sanidine) enclosed , it moreover 
receives a porphyritic structure, while in smaller or larger vesi- 
cular spaces light-brown mica appears. There can be no doubt 
as to the genuine lava-character of the rock. As by the stretch- 
ing and pulling of a mass composed of mixed fusions , artificially 
streaked glass is produced, so this rock is likely to have originated 
from a volcanic magma composed of various stone-fusions. My friend, 
Baron v. Richthofen has, in 1860, described quite a similar kind of 
rock from the vicinity of Telkibanya, Mad, Tokay, Sarospatak etc. 
in Hungary, under the name of Litlioidit, or lithoidic Rhyolith, 
while Dr. J. Roth has named a similar lava upon the Liparian Is- 
lands Liparit. 1 
North of the Totara the Hinemau river (al. Hinemaiai), empties 
into the lake. Its valley is distinguished by numerous, extremely 
regular terraces. From that point off*, the shores of the lake are 
formed by towering cliffs, the snow-white colour of which had long 
ago attracted our attention from afar. We now found that those 
bluffs rising at some places to the height of 300 feet, consisted of 
pumicestone. Although I had long ago become accustomed to the 
huge masses of pumicestone, scattered everywhere throughout the 
North Island, yet, I could not help gazing with astonishment, 
on beholding here, in the mother-country as it were, where all 
the pumicestones originate, pumicestone deposited in small fragments 
1 What Dieffenbach states in various passages of his work concerning the oc- 
currence of leucit in the lavas and in the sand on Lake Taupo, is a mistake. Those 
little crystals are either quartz or felspar. 
Ilochstetter, New Zealand. 
25 
