350 
Glacial Period in the 
[July. 
be greatly in advance of others. In both New Zealand and 
Patagonia there are wide plains to the east and a coast 
indented with deep fiords to the west. It is certainly a 
curious circumstance that we have similar fadts of glaciation 
in two countries so far removed, unless they were due to 
general and not to local causes. The advance of an ice- 
sheet from the south-east accounts for the phenomena ; the 
drainage of the eastern coasts would be obstructed, whilst 
local glaciers would form, or be greatly increased where they 
now exist, by the precipitation of frozen moisture from the 
south-west winds when the mountains were raised by the 
lowering of the ocean-level, 2000 feet higher above the sea 
than they now stand. 
Excepting the formation of the plains, I do not know of 
any evidence in South America of the advance of the ice 
upon the eastern coast ; but in New Zealand Capt. Hutton 
has described an immense accumulation of clay containing 
angular blocks of mica-schist, many of large size, on the 
eastern or coast side of the Taieri Plain, and extending 
from the Taieri River nearly to Otakaia, a distance of about 
3 miles. This deposit is many miles to the eastward of any 
known extension of the inland glaciers, and Capt. Hutton 
ascribes its origin to an earlier glacier period than the last. 
He says that there is a similar mica-schist on the sea-coast 
at Brighton, but rejects the supposition that they could 
have come from thence, because “ many of the blocks are 
considerably above the highest level of the mica-schists 
there, and there is no conceivable agency by which they 
could have been brought from there.”* The formation of 
this morainic deposit, and the transport of blocks of mica- 
schist inland, so difficult to account for by the extension of 
local glaciers, is just what we might expedt on the theory of 
the advance of the ice from the south-east. No broken shells 
have been found in this deposit, such as mark, in other parts 
of the world, the drift left by glaciers that had crossed ocean- 
beds ; but perhaps further examination may detedt them. 
It may be said, in regard to the formation of great 
lakes of fresh water by the advance of such enormous 
masses of ice upon the coasts, that the cold would be suffi- 
cient to freeze the lakes themselves and change them to 
masses of solid ice. But a minute’s consideration will re- 
move this objection. The temperature of the ice when it 
reached the coasts of New Zealand and South America 
would be little, if anything, below the freezing-point, and it 
* Geology and Gold-Fields of Otago, p. 62. 
