to the wayfarer of to-day amongst these interesting scenes:—“Whence the activity which still pours forth the boiling waters of Rotomahana to run glistening down the silica terraces of their own constant formation—wherein the force that lights the red fires which burn ever in the crater of White Island—or what the motive power that still throws up a cone in the crater of Tongariro (Ngauruhoe)? “The reply from the waters of Rotomahana, from the fires of White Island, and from the cone of Tongariro was the same—the one word, “Sulphur.” Whether the almost universally imagined heat of the interior of the earth has any existence in fact does not materially affect the subject; for it was enough to the observer that sulphur in its natural state lay beneath the crust of the earth in beds of greater or less extent, being self-combustible when heated and moist, smouldering for long years—burning near the surface sufficient to melt the rocks and throw them out as lava and pumice amidst fire and smoke, and with reports like cannon—or heating the internal waters which came into contact with it, and forcing them up as minerally impregnated geysers, or as sulphurous steam. It was easy to follow out the idea and conceive how these inflammably begot forces, confined in the interior and unable to escape, have raised the land into mountain-masses; or, as the material consumed, have caused the crust of the earth, sometimes gradually, at other times violently, to sink into the empty caverns. Hence earthquakes but wait upon the sulphur fires below, and attest their wide-spread power. Whether at boiling cauldron or bursting crater the only inflammable or explosive substance to be seen is Sulphur, and the only effect observable is that from its fire. Steaming basins, smoking craters, and destroying earthquakes, it may be safely assumed, never occur without the presence of Sulphur as the good or evil genius of the phenomena.

Rotomahana.—During the writer's stay at the Terraces he was favoured with an exhibition of the subsidence of the waters of Te Tarata into the caverns below; and as the Terraces on that occasion got dry, it was noteworthy how brittle the silicious surface became, showing upon what a slender thread the beauties of that mountain side hang; for, were the flow of the blue waters to stop, as stop it must when the energies of the forces below exhaust themselves, the glory as well as the cause of Rotomahana will disappear.

Tongariro (Ngauruhoe).—When the writer visited the crater of Tongariro in May of last year, there was a cone on the north-west side of it. This cone was about 120 feet wide at the top, and was closed at the bottom as if the volcano had not been in action for a considerable time. Upon the writer's climbing the mountain (a feat always attended with difficulty and risk) and descending into the orater, in December following, he found that