to belong to any of the adjacent mountains. It is altogether about 800 feet high, and the rock on the top composes about half of the whole mass. I saw it afterwards from all sides, and can hardly imagine how any one could ever get up to the top, much less how a village could have existed there. As we emerged from the valley, we saw that the rock was on the other side of the Waikato, which here runs rapidly through a small barren plain of about twenty miles long, hemmed in at each end by narrow gorges. We travelled some miles along the plain to seek a good place for encampment, but did not meet with any wood till nine at night, and then could only get a few stunted Karoaka or Karooka bushes[1] to make a fire with. The soil was so thin, that bushes five feet high came up with a slight pull of the hand. It was entirely broken pumice, large masses of which lined the sides of the river. The first night I spent on the banks of this river was so intensely cold, that I could not sleep. At nine next morning (February 25) the thermometer stood at thirty-nine in the tent. This cold could not be caused by the elevation of the country, as the barometer at the same time was only 2940. The morning was bright and sunshiny. After this I had frequent reason to observe the great chilliness of the climate of the interior, the range of the thermometer being rarely above 60 at one o'clock in those parts of the country where the barometer indicated a mean of about twenty-nine inches, and this too in the middle of summer, or rather in what ought to correspond with our July and August. The natives told me that in the winter there was often snow on all this part of the country; and that on the hills around, which were not by any means to be called mountains, it often lay for a week together. In fording a river tributary to the Waikato, I was rather startled to find, that although the water was intensely cold, yet I could not stand still, because
