NOTES FROM THE SOUTH.

New Zealand Spectator and Cook's Strait Guardian, Volume IX, Issue 843, 31 August 1853, Page 3

NOTES FROM THE SOUTH.

11. I will now leave the eggs to their fate and glance at one or two more wonders of te 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 deeper 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 bye; and I

give fair warning that when I begin to theorize there anent I shall theorize as wildly as possible in the hope of provoking some great savant of the N.Z. Society to shake offhis 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 fossil 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 freshwater formation, or possibly the sill of an estuary, a small tree here and there shewing that wood was in its time not quite so scarce 'in its neighbourhood 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 havresack, I rolled them. This bed, about two feet thick, rests on one of darker blue clay, which is better seen in a low cliff two hundred yards up the river. In this there are multitudes of shells, univalves, bii alyes, 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 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 I have not yet observed thejuncture 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 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 te 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, looking, as my maoris observed, very like Ngatimamoe, pipe stalks without the bore, — at Crinoline cliffs large dentalia are 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. Sharks teeth of two or three different kinds are found every Avhere : 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 havresack — 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 — terebratulae; venericardia; a very beautiful spiral shell, genus unknown, (seal aria?) a pentacrinite with richly ornamented ossicles ; goniasters, a large jointed oval, and last, not least, the tarsometatarsal (about 2^in. long) of some large penguinlike bird. When we have any public museums to fill, this limestone will go far toward filling 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 the 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,consisting 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 con stant dilution by land streams, in which thj freshwater blue clay was deposited. Ths encroachment of the sea still in progress breaking the edge of the basin, the flat was left dry and the territory peopled by a class 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 j by the wind. -*

*•> Br the Necromancer a mail ha 9 been received 'from Lyttelton bringing Lyttelton and Nelson papers, and some Australian papers of June forwarded from Nelson to Lyttelton and thence to Wellington, At Lyttelton Mr. Fitzgerald had been elected member for the General Assembly by a majority of ten votes, the number atthe close of the poll being Fitzgerald » 55 Dampier 45 Our intelligence of the elections at Nelson is taken from the Lyttelton Times.