Page:Picturesque New Zealand, 1913.djvu/315

Rh says that this lake bed, and other large lake beds of the South Island as well, was dug with a spade about a thousand years ago by Chief Rakaihaitu. If this be true, Rakaihaitu was the greatest navvy New Zealand has ever produced; and had he lived until to-day he would have been the very man to dig the Panama Canal. In his reputed excavation of Wakatipu, Rakaihaitu so warmed to his task that he almost forgot to make any islands. At the last moment this oversight seems suddenly to have dawned upon him, and he left four spadefuls of earth in the basin. These are called Pig, Tree, Pigeon, and Gum Tree Islands, but three of them need renaming. The only one honestly entitled to its name is Gum Tree Island, which has several eucalyptus trees on it. On Tree Island I saw not a single tree; on Pig Island there were no pigs; and on Pigeon Island no pigeons; but, a lake resident informed me apologetically, in reference to each of these misnomers, "there used to be." In Wakatipu district evidence of glacial erosion is very marked. I saw it in ice-worn mountain, in drifted debris, in huge stranded boulders, and, especially in the north arm, in many striking terrace formations. Professor James Park, director of the Otago School of Mines, says there is proof that this region has been covered with a continuous ice sheet of vast depth, and that probably it spread over the greater part of the South Island in the Pleistocene period, when, he declares, "glaciation in New Zealand was not exceeded in magnitude anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere."