ATTEMPT TO CLIMB THE EASTERN SPUR.
"Some of the moraines, or channels, cut by the glaciers are very deep, and most of the lakes lie in what were moraines ages and ages ago, when the ice extended much farther than it does now. Lake Pukaki is a fine example of this; it is shut in by an old terminal moraine which attains a height of one hundred and eighty-six feet above the surface of the lake. On the western side of the Alps there are deep channels which are called 'sounds,' and greatly resemble the fiords of Norway. Some of them are eighteen or twenty miles long, and vary from half a mile to two or three miles in width; their sides rise almost perpendicularly, sometimes for hundreds of feet, and they are nearly all too deep to permit ships to anchor. Sounding-lines a thousand feet long often fail to find bottom there. Perhaps they are called sounds because they can't be sounded.
RIVER ISSUING FROM A GLACIER.
"These sounds are supposed to be ancient moraines, and during the ice period of the world they were the beds of glaciers coming from immense lakes, encircling the bases of the mountains and covering areas of thousands of miles. Altogether the scenery of the Southern Alps is said to be magnificent."
Doctor Bronson had decided to make no stop on the way until reaching Dunedin, and though earnestly urged to spend a day at Timaru, in order to see the harbor works there, the establishment for freezing meat, the barbed wire factory, and other enterprises, he did not swerve from his resolution. The party reached Dunedin late in the evening, and went to the hotel which had been recommended as one of the best. They had no occasion to complain of it, and in the morning were ready to "do" the sights of the place.
Dunedin has the reputation of being the largest, best built, and most important commercial city of New Zealand; it is the capital of the provincial district of Otago, and the commercial centre of a large area of country. The settlement of Otago was projected in 1846, and it was intended to be exclusively occupied by adherents of the Free Kirk of Scotland, just as Canterbury at a later date was to be the monopoly of adherents of the Church of England. The colony was not especially prosperous under its exclusive system, though the thrifty settlers had not much to complain of except the scarcity of neighbors.
But gold changed the whole scene, and broke down the barrier which the projectors of the colony had erected. In 1861 rich gold-diggings were discovered about seventy miles from Dunedin; diggers flocked in from Australia and from other parts of the world, and from the beginning of the gold rush Dunedin dates its prosperity.