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New Zealand Mail, Issue 1514, 7 March 1901, Page 64

The amount which the Wellington Hospital Trustees will ask the District Board for this year will be £12,360, as compared with £7BOO last year. A portion of the increase will be necessary to meet expenditure on the erection of a new nurses’ home at the Hospital. The increased cost of living in Wellington of late has been taken into consideration in arriving at the estimates for the ensuing year. Consequently increased amounts will be asked for in regard to groceries (£1450, as compared with £1380), meiat and poultry (£IOOO, as compared with £830), and milk (£650, as compared with £590). The amount required to be expended in bread is set down at £2BO, and for vegetables £l2O. The new nurses’ home is to be erected on the vacant section on the north side of the future children’s ward. The nurses’ home at Christchurch cost £SOOO, and that at Dunedin £3238. It is expected that the Wellington nurses’ home will cost about. £SOOO to erect.

Striking evidence of extinct glaciers have been found in the vicinity of Mount Kosciusko. A party has discovered that, chiefly in the neighbourhood of the Blue Lake, the granite rock, for acres in extent, is deeply rutted and grooved by glacier ice, which must have been at least 200 feet in thickness. These ice-grooved rock surfaces, though somewhat obscured by weathering, are still wonderfully perfect, and are comparable to those of the most typical gla•cdal regions of the Northern Hemisphere. Near the lake called Hedley Tarn there are four fine terminal moraines, each

about 100 feet high, and a fifth forms the darn of the Blue Lake. Ice-striated boulders were found in these moraines, as well as in the perfect terminal moraines of Lake May or Gootapatanga Lake. A perfect moraine, with numerous ice-striated boulders, and glaciated pavements, wa,s also found near the head of the Snowy River, about a mile and a half northerly from the Kosciusko Observatory. The results of this geological examination prove that Australia has passed through a glacial epoch in comparatively recent time, perhaps synchronous with the Great Ice Age of the Northern Hemisphere.