described as severe, (as they no doubt appeared to those who experienced them), they cannot really be so classed when it is taken into consideration that no chimneys fell, nor were light articles, such as bottles, vases, etc., cast down from shelves, except in one or two instances. No one who experienced the heavy earthquakes of 1848 or 1855, which caused such dismay in the vicinity of Cook Strait, could call those recently occurring severe ones.

It is true, in some places the earth has cracked and opened, but nowhere to any great extent. Nothing occurred like the great cracks at Wanganui and Wairau, in Cook Strait.

It is a very noticeable fact that all of the cracks we saw took the general north-easterly direction of the line of volcanic action, and all of them followed closely along depressions in the surface, which are undoubtedly old cracks, due to much heavier earthquakes in the past.