Page:Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, vol. 26.djvu/580

 a different Crocodilian, which had frequented the shores of the ancient estuary and, so far as my imperfect acquaintance with the subject enabled me to judge, appeared to belong to a species of Teleosaurus which had stood much higher off the ground than any hitherto figured. Considerable quantities of coprolites were imbedded in one of the boulders found in the river-bed ; and in a gully some three or four miles to the north-west (which had been so deeply excavated by the great floods of late years, especially of 1866 *, as scarcely to be recognized, any more than the upper part of the larger tributary, by one who had not visited the district for many years) valuable additions were made to the spoils. Here we were rewarded by finding a boulder with bones sticking out of it in all directions. It was intensely hard, however ; and the fossils were in a very friable condition, and broke to pieces when the stone was struck, however carefully. We collected the fragments and covered them with gelatine in the shape of liquid glue ; and the specimens (very splendid ones) proved quite perfect, and, when joined together, scarcely showed the fractures.

the changes effected by the great storms which have within the last few years surprised the settlers in the Canterbury Province, aid afforded most striking evidence of the power of running water to accomplish what, without such demonstration, most observers would probably deem it necessary to refer to the agency of ice. The great flood above referred to, descending suddenly without apparent adequate cause, was attributed in one place to the giving way of the barrier of some glacier-lake; in another district the astonished setters, escaping from their submerged dwellings, imagined that a water-spout had burst over the lofty peaks of the inner ranges ; but when the fact became known that the floods had extended throughout the country, from Nelson to Southland, it was plain that neither explanation sufficed. It is not difficult to account for such a debacle in the Middle Island, subject to such storms as that which occurred in the winter of 1867, when the snow lay on the plains to the depth of 6 feet, and the drifts obliterated valleys of 500 feet in the lower ranges, so that in one instance a surveying party passed over a gorge of fully that depth, without being aware of its existence until the following summer. The accumulations of severe winters are exposed suddenly to the breath of the hot N.W. wind, which, rising up over the lower currents, passes across the intervening sea from Australia, and strikes upon the summits of the lofty Cordillera, and there rapidly melts the snows, and sweeps down upon the eastern plains with its dry scorching blasts, which, even in early spring raise the thermometer to 90° in the shade. Under such circumstances we may be prepared to witness even greater changes rapidly effected in the contour of the country, in which such remarkable memorials remain of the times when, under different cosmical influences, the climate was more rainy, and the glaciers (although still descending through noble forests to within a few hundred feet of the sea, upon a scale of almost unequalled grandeur) attained much vaster proportions, and other operations went on in proportionate magnitude. In Dr. Haast's excellent paper upon the formation of the Canterbury plains, the enormous deposits of gravel and sand are described that compose this great tract of country, which, although seemingly a dead level, slopes on an average 30 feet in* the mile to the sea. In such a region one can understand great changes of the surface taking place also gradually and unobserved, under the eyes of the inhabitants. A curious evidence of this was afforded by the discovery of a silver ornament, at the depth of 50 feet, in digging a well at Christchurch, which gave rise to surmises as to the Peruvian origin of the aborigines, until the article was recognized by a lady as having been lost by her ten years before, when her husband pitched his tent near the spot.
 * The writer hopes to be able, in a future paper, to give exact details of