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difficulty in ascending them to the rolling and hilly surface. It is formed of coarse grit sandstones and conglomerates, interstratified with indurated clay shale containing small seams of coaly matter, and also obvious impressions of fossil plants. The sandstone sometimes contains nodules that are evidently the remains of shells, all the characters of which have been lost.

The strata appear to have been much disturbed near the boundary of the slates, which form the eastern angle of the Island, but towards the west they are well exposed in cliffs, and they appear to be nearly horizontal. They displayed the same character and order of succession of the different strata on both sides of the Island.

On the mainland to the south of the Narrow Strait, named in chart, Otago’s Retreat, they were also observed, but much disturbed. It is, however, probable that this formation extends over a considerable area of land through elevated country which stretches to the south-east of Preservation Inlet to the landward of Windsor Point.

The thickness of this series of strata is not less than 1,500 feet. They are almost identical in character with the carbonaceous series of Victoria, as displayed at Griffith’s Point, and to the conglomerates of the Horse Ranges and Shag Point in the eastern part of this Province. The sandstone near the junction with the slates is composed of granitic sand, so finely re-cemented, that at first glance it appears to have been the character and fracture of a true granite. The surface of the Island is covered with fine timber that is very open, being rarely choked with thicket.

The prevailing trees are ironwood, remu, and birch. The stems of the trees and surface of the ground are covered with a profusion of small ferns and immense lichens. The former are principally various species of the delicate hymenophylli. On the morning of the first July the Maories at last arrived, having been waiting at Pahia, the native village west of Riverton, since the 22nd of June for a fair wind to bring them round.

Next day I proceeded up Preservation Inlet in the Maori boat, which was large and commodious as compared with our own small whale boat. I had a crew of six Maories and one of my own men. Above Cording Islands the inlet is narrowed to less than half a mile in width by the jutting out of a promontory from its western shores. On the right hand of this long narrow passage thus formed, the mountains rise very abruptly from 2000 to 3000 feet, and are composed to their full height of granite, which contains the prevailing formation, till near the top of the Sound, excepting at a few points, where there are patches of the slates, and one place to the south of Last Cove where there is a lofty vertical cliff of syenitic gneiss like that of the Bluff. At the upper end of the Sound the formation is mica schist, felspathic gneiss, and quartzite. A strong current flows out through the Narrow with the ebb tide, but owing to the quantity of fresh water poured into the head of the Sound, the influence of the flood tide is hardly felt. There are several wooded flats of limited extent, and almost level with the water opposite to the mouths of streams descending from valleys in the mountains.

Excepting these flats, there is hardly standing room to be found anywhere along the sides of the Sound above the Narrows until reaching its upper extremity.

On one of the flats we went ashore for dinner; it was about five acres in extent, and at a distance of 100 feet from the shore, the water suddenly deepens to 60 or 70 fathoms. The gentle slope out to the edge of this bank is nearly dry at low water, and is covered with cockles and large mussels, on which numbers of sea fowl were feeding when we arrived. The abundance and large size of the mussels on the shores of this Sound, and even on a sandy or gravelly bottom, which is usually repugnant to them, seemed very remarkable, as there were few, if any, seen in Chalky Inlet, excepting minute specimens studding the rocks between tide-marks.

I followed up the stream which enters the Sound at this point, climbing over large boulders that obstructed its channel for half a mile, till I reached Fine Cascade, 120 feet in height. Nothing but the debris of granite rocks was met with in the bed of this stream.

As we coasted along, the Maories caught a number of wood hens, going ashore when they saw them among the rocks, and securing them with a flax noose on the end of a wand. We encamped at the mouth of a stream about four miles from the bed of the Sound. Among the fragments brought down by the stream were some masses of reef quartz, along with gneiss and hard silicious slates. The rock in situ is the same granite as previously. We had omitted to bring a tent, and slept in the boat, which was moored a little distance on the shore; while the Maories camped in the bush, making a shelter from the rain, which had now commenced, with the boat sail; but they very stupidly had their camp on a level with high water, and being spring tide, the sea rose in the night and flowed right over where they were lying, so that they had to take refuge in the roots of some dead trees, and remain perched there till morning.

Next day, the boat being exposed to a high wind which had sprung up from the west, we were obliged to decamp in spite of the drenching rain. We did not go far, however, as the Maories found an overhanging precipice that afforded protection from wind and rain. It was a singular camping place, the cliff being about 100 feet high, with a narrow ledge of fallen stones twenty feet long and eighteen