Proceedings. : md 521 
the South Esk, at Perth, where the width is upwards of 150 feet. ‘The 
model was closely examined and its principle freely criticised. : 
By command of His Excellency the Lieutenant-Governor there was 
placed before the meeting eight massive quarto volumes, superbly bound in 
present case in support of this theory, as the island was then so thinly 
peopled, that the Waitaha residents of Ruamoa had probably no one near to 
fight with,—no flocks of hostile human mutton from which to obtain a 
change of diet; and they might have had prejudices against preying on | 
their friends and relations even more strong than those of their Anglo- 
Saxon successors, Hl : 
No signs were discovered of any attempt to adapt to use or ornament any 
of the bone which at a later period was so prized by the natives for fish 
hooks, aud a variety of purposes, No ponamu was found, so that, although 
as almost proved by the flints, the smaller pieces of which were chipped 
into pretty effective knives, the lakes in the interior must have been familiar 
to them, the West coast must still have been unknown; and although it 
might have been peopled at the same period by way of Taitapu, the two 
streams of migration had not met. ‘This event, however, had occurred at 
the period of the occupation of the old Kahaunui Kaika, about four miles 
south; for I not only found there many ponamu ornaments, but a stone 
ipu about twelve inches in diameter, with two grotesque heads roughly 
carved in a soft variety of jade, the history of which I may give you at 
some future time. 
I will now leave the eggs to their fate and glance at one or two more 
wonders of the Awamoa; and if I should hereafter wander from those to 
places more and more remote, dragging your readers from one end to the 
other of our noble Province, let the blame rest, not on me, but on those 
who, a thousand times better qualified than I for the task, have left its 
wonders so long uncelebrated. 
The sandy earth in which the ovens are dug is of no great depth, say 
from one foot to eighteen inches, the ets ovens going quite through it 
into the pale blue clay below, of which the baked ball already mentioned 
was probably made. Now this blue clay, though a thin and apparently 
insignificant stratum, forms an interesting link in a chain of eras which I 
‘shall talk of by and by; and I give fair warning, that when I begin to 
theorize their anent, I shall theorize as wildly as possible, in the hope of 
royoking some great savant of the New Zealand Society to shake off 
his share of the slumbers of that body, for the savage pleasure of tearing 
my poor little theories into their constituent facts, or, if he:can, into 
morsels yet more minute. - 
In this clay are millions of small univalve fossils shells of various 
genera, the names of which, did I know them, I would not inflict upon 
your readers, and all with those characteristics of thinness, &c., which we 
find in the shells of muddy brooks in England, It is, in short, a fresh- 
water formation, or possibly the sill of an estuary, a small tree here and 
there showing that wood was in its time not quite so scarce in its neigh- 
bourhood as now. How many species I collected there I cannot say, for I 
have not yet had time to remove them from the ball of clay in which, for 
their better protection in my haversack, I rolledthem. ‘This bed, about 
two feet thick, rests on one of darker blue clay, whichis better seen in a 
low cliff two hundred yards up the river. In this there are multitudes of 
shells, univalves, bivalves, and all sorts of valves, with innumerable small 
shells of very elegant form; one of the largest and most abundant is a 
wing shaped spondylus (?) regularly striated and of a rich purplish brown 
colour, Some few, as the Voluta Pacifica, an ostrea, and a pinna, seem 
oF 
