SOME NEW ZEALAND NATURALISTS.

Otago Witness, Issue 3338, 6 March 1918, Page 55

SOME NEW ZEALAND NATURALISTS.

XIV.—ALEXANDER. M'KAY, F.G.S. By G. M. Thomson, F.L.S. Few among the youngei generation outside of geological circles have heard of Alexander M'Kay, a man who had lived almost in retirement for some years in Wellington, and who passed away in the middle of last year. But one wlio knew him well, and the work which he did, wrote thus of him soon after his death:—■ "Hochstetter, Haast, Hector, and Hutton," the four H's, " have long been names to conjure with in New Zealand geology; but in the last few years the mana of Alexander M'Kay has so increased that he is now regarded as the greatest of them all. His death removes from our midst one of the greatest original thinkers that New Zealand in her brief career has seen." His was a prominent and picturesque figure in public life at one time; but, as I have said, latterly his leonine figure was but little seen. He was born in 184-1 in Kirkcudbrightshire, Scotland, and came to New Zealand in 1863, landing at ,the Bluff from, the ship Helenslee. For some time he followed the occupation of a gold-miner in Otago and at Wakamarino, after which he went over to Australia and worked on the New South Wales and Queensland diggings. In 1866 he returned to New Zealand, and for the next four years was" engaged in exploring and prospecting the south-west part of the Mackenzie country, on the borders of Canterbury and Otago. There he conducted explorations alone and at all seasons of the year, and was known as " the wild man of the Mackenzie country." Incidentally, he claimed to be the first man who refrigerated meat in New Zealand, having in this manner preserved for long periods both mutton and game in the glaciers of the Southern Alps. In 1868 he became acquainted with Dr (afterwards Sir Julius)) von Haast, who was then founding the Canterbury Museum, and he contributed largely to its enrichment. He used to tell an amusing story about one of their joint excursions in the then almost untrodden field of the Southern Alps. He and Dr Haast were seated on or near the summit of a high mountain, and the latter was expatiating on the glory of being an original discoverer in such beautiful and interesting country, and waxed enthusiastic over the idea that they were the first white men who had ever been on the spot, when a voice sounded over their shoulders, " Have either of you b seen any sheep about here?" The beautiful dream was thus rudely shattered. In 1870 M'Kay was engaged prospecting for coal at Ashley Gorge, Canterbury, Avhere he again met Dr von Haast, who secured him as his assistant in prosecuting some geological surveys which he was carrying out for the New Zealand Government. After exploring the central mountain region of ■Canterbury and the Shag Point coalfields, the expedition returned to Christchurch, and later Mr M'Kay explored and made large collections from the saurian beds in the middle Waipara district, North Canterbury. In 1872 he explored and excavated m the " Moa Bone Cave," near Sumner. Canterbury. Starting originally as a labourer and then fossilcollector, he proved, extremely adept at this manual work, which requires a quick eye and much natural aptitude. At the end of the year the late Dr (afterwards Sir James) Hector was in Christchurch, and, noting the additions to the museum of the fossil saurians from Waipara, obtained M'Kay's services for the Colonial Museum and Geological Survey, and engaged him to make a collection at Amuri Bluff of similar remains. This work he finished in March, 1873, bringing back to Wellington a very large collection of rare and valuable fossils that are now one of

the most interesting features of the Dominion Museum. Also, in the end of the same year, he made a geological survey of the southern part of Otago, and in the early part of 1874 of part of the West Coast goldfields, besides accompanying Dr Hector to the East Coast of the Auckland province, and examining the .country from Gisborne to the mouth of the Waipao River. Then he was appointed a permanent officer of the Geological Department, in -which capacity he made and published full details of the results of surveys of many districts. For about 20 years his work " lay mainly in collecting fossils and writing accounts of the rocks from which they were obtained. His knowledge of geology he picked up from books and from personal contact with other geologists • but lie does not seem to have been a wide reader. Rather he learned from th 3 rocks themselves, and from hard thinking about the problems they presented. •So far as the classification of the rocks by their fossil contents is concerned, he allowed himself to be guided in all important points by Sir James Hector, and the"classification, adopted by the latter is based largely on Mr M'Kay's field work. This classification was only a shrewd guess, since the fossils were not worked out and described in detail, and already it has had to be modified in several directions. All subsequent -work, however, has gone to show the sxibstantial accuracy of Mr M'Kay's field work."

In 1892 he was appointed Mining Geologist, which position he held until his retirement some years ago. In an appreciation of him written soon after his death by Dr J. Allan Thomson, Director of the Dominion Museum, we are told: " It is not, however, as a fossil-collector that his name will live, although he himself seemed to consider this his greatest contribution, but.rather by his views on structural geology. The Alps and Himalayas owe their elevation to the crumpling and ' folding of sedimentary rocks by tangential pressure, and a similar explanation has been almost universally accepted for the mountains of New Zealand. The great intermont basin* of Central Otago, like the Strath-Taieri, the Maniototo i-iain, and the lake basins of Wakatipu and Wanaka, are on this theory the result of subsequent denudation by rivers and glaciers. From the days when he worked amongst them as a prospector Mr M'K'ay never considered this explanation adequate to explain the gigantic size and peculiar shape of these depressions. The explanation came 20 years later, when he explored the Middle Clarence and Awatere Valleys of Marlborough, and their long strips of younger rocks, faulted in between the towering Kaikouras. The presence in these fiord-like valleys of the Amuri limestone—a fine-grained, chalky rock, which contains no sediment —led him to conclude that ithad been deposited in an open sea when the mountains did not exist as such. The fault-lines by which the younger_ rocks became involved among the mountains led him to frame the glaringly improbable hypothesis (for so it was regarded) that the mountains were pushed bodily up from below in blocks at no very distant date, leaving between them valley depressions. During the next few years he extended this hypothesis to cover the majority of the mountains and intermont basins of New Zealand. It was faults run mad, so mad that the university geologists for 15 years refused to consider them seriously. During these 15 years the description and explaiiation of surfaee forms bave developed, chiefly in America, into _ a new and pofent instrument of geological inquiry, under the name of physiography. No one could foresee five years ago what the investigation of the faultscarp from the Tinakori Valley to Petone by Dr O. A. Cotton would lead to; but his subsequent application of criteria to the major fault-lines postulated by Mr M'Kay has conclusively demonstrated the essential truth of the latter's views on the origin of the mountains of New Zealand. In this field Mr M'Kay was a pioneer, utterly uninfluenced by the work of other men in other countries. He created no school, and hardly influenced his contemporaries. But posterity will honour his name."

Last year an article appeared in the Geological Magazine, written by Mr 0. T. Trechmann, M.Sc, F.G.S., who visited New Zealand in 1915 to conduct special investigations. One question that particularly concerned him was the age of the " Maitai series," a geological formation which for very many years had been the subject of controversy. ' In 1867 von Hochstetter, before any distinctive fossils had been found in these rocks, considered that the "Maitai series," which formed the hills bounding to the east" and south-east a strip of fossiliferous trias in the Nelson area, were of the Triassic Age, and underlay the sandstone. In 1873 F. W. Hutton referred the " Maitai series" to the Jurassic Age on the occurrence of the genus known as Inoceramus. In 1878 Mr M'Kay made a survey of the Nelson district, and found several fossils, obviously of the late Palaeozoic Age, in the Maitai limestone, on the upper part of the lower Wairoa Gorge. Mr M'Kay also surveyed and collected from the Maitai slates' argillites at Wooded Peak, on the Dun Mountain tramway, some five miles east of Nelson. A large bivalve shell having the prismatic structure and concentric plication of Inoceramus occurs here. Mr M'Kay, however, in his report, added that "there are material differences between this shell and ordinary forms of Inoceramus, which might warrant it being considered the type of a new genus." These words were of great importance, clearly stating his conviction that traces of the prismatio shell, which occurred with the carboniferous shell in the Maitai limestone, belonged to the same as that which occurs in the slates on Wooded Peak. It is now recognised 1 as the same shell; but in 1893 Mr M'Kay's observations were seriously questioned bv Professor J. Park, who stated his opinion that the Maitai were of Jurassic Age. In 1910 he re-examined the fossils collected by Mr M'Kay, and declared that the Maitai limestone was

carboniferous, and stated that a careful search was male for fossils at the place where Inoceramus was said to occur; but without success. This was not the last of the matter, for in 1911 a resurvoy of the Dun Mountain district was made by the Mines and Survey Department, the party comprising Dr J. M. Bell, Mr E. de C. Clarke, and Professor O. Marshall. In their report they found the rocks in the district to be of conformable series of the Trias-Jura Age. They failed utterly to find Mr M'Kay's fossils, and in 1912 "Professor Marshal! repeated the statement. In October, 1915, Mr Trechmann, with Dr J. A. Thomson, made careful inquiries as to the locality in which the fossils were found, and on visiting the spot had the good fortune almost simultaneously to find the fossils at the place indicated. They made a large collection of the fossils, which bore out what Mr M'Kay had said, and sustained his reputation. "Mr M'Kay was a, self-educated man as far as science is concerned—that is to say, ho owed nothing to any university or higher school of learning. This was his great misfortune, for had he acquired facility in lucid presentation and incisive writing, his work would have been recognised 20 years ago, and he would have been acclaimed one of the greatest geologists of the world. His great original discoveries, such as tele-photography and the mode of formation of block mountains, have been rediscovered in other parts of the world, and they. are not generally credited to him. Fortunately, he was surrounded by a small band of appreciative friends, and lived to see at least a partial recognition of his services to New Zealand geology. He had just enough vanity to make it a delight to yield him appreciation. At the 1917 meeting of the New Zealand Institute a special letter was sent to him, recognising the great work that he had done in this country."