522 Proceedings. 
red-grained morocco, richly gilt and ornamented, together with a case uni- 
formly covered and ornamented and clasped with gold, containing a series 
of the Medals issued at the Great Exhibition of 1851, presented by Her 
Majesty's Commissioners to the colony of Van Diemen’s Land. These 
identical with living species; but the remainder are new to me. Besides 
shells I found a rolled bone or two (cetacean?) and a few pieces of wood. 
Again, below this marine blue clay, at an unascertained depth, for Lhave 
not yet observed the junction of the beds, lies the tertiary limestone ; 
from the little cliff on the Awaawa you can see it cropping out less than a 
mile off. This limestone (noticed in the proceedings of the Geological 
Society as the Ototara limestone) one meets more or less developed here 
and there throughout the Southern and Eastern part of the Province. Up 
to the Waiau, half way to the Anau; at Otago, in the Kaikarahi valley ; 
at Waikawaiti, Goodwood, Waihemo, Kakaunui, and up the Waitaki far 
beyond the Gorge. It is full of fossils, which vary greatly in the different 
localities. At Takiroa caves the ground is strewed with pseudo-belemnites, 
as my maoris observed, very like Ngatimamoe, pipe-stalks without the bore: 
at Crinoline Cliffs large dentalia ore equally numerous round the base of 
the stone lady, while her voluminous gown is encircled by a band of huge 
areas. Spatangi, or sea urchins, are the fashionable shell at Waikawaiti, 
while their spines, most thorny affairs, seem to have migrated in a body to 
Christmas caves, near Awamoa. Shark’s teeth of two or three different 
kinds are found every where: close to Crinoline, on the face of a cliff there, 
is a fine specimen of vertebrae, and other bones of a cetacean, which the 
Commissioner says he has left for the New Zealand Society, as it was too 
large for his haversack: it is about six feet long. But a list of the fossils 
already found in this limestone would fill a column of your paper, so I will 
‘restrict myself to a few more—terebratule ; venericardia; a very beautiful 
spiral shell, genus unknown, (scalaria?) a pentacrinite with richly orna- 
mented ossicles; goniasters, a large jointed oval, and last, not least, the 
tarsometatarsal (about 24 in. long) of some large penguin-like bird. When 
we have any public museums to fill, this limestone will go far toward 
fillg them, and we shall then feel more deeply our loss in the departure 
for Australia of the only perfectly scientific man in New Zealand. 
Now for a simple notion about the succession of these formations. I 
cannot resist the temptation of theorizing, however absurdly ; ’tis so much 
easier to start a theory than to collect facts. 
Let us begin with the limestone ;—that, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is 
marine to the back bone (of the cetacean at Crinoline aforesaid), deposited 
in a deep and tranquil sea, in which Mount Domett might have stood as a 
reef, The fossils of the limestone passing gradually into the blue clay 
above it, the same species being sometimes found in both, but differently 
developed, we may assume that the change which brought the detritus of 
the land to constitute the submarine deposit in place of the limestone, con- 
sisting of little but the remains of shells and corals, was slow—the future 
island emerging from the brine, with proper gravity and deliberation, till it 
had risen so high as to enclose a considerable body of water gradually - 
freshened by drainage into the sea and constant dilution by land streams, 
in which the fresh water blue clay was deposited. The encroachment of 
the sea still in progress breaking the edge of the basin, the flat was left 
dry, and the territory peopled by aclass settlement of Moas, on Dinornithic 
principles. Next comes man in the shape of the Waitaha tribe, and settles 
the country and the Moas. Next a bank is once more formed toward the 
sea, and the surface sandy loam soon accumulates from mud brought by 
the stream and sand blown in by the wind.” 
