[1 word illeg] Christchurch NZ. | 14 April 1864
My dear Sir
Many thanks for your letter of July last1 enclosing your photograph, the receipt of which gave me infinite pleasure and which I shall always value highly. I only returned a few days ago from a journey into the Alps, my principal object being to examine once more carefully the terraces, old moraines, roches moutoneés2 etc. Not trusting to my eye or the Aneroid only, I used extensively the spirit level and thus obtained some very curious and interesting results, which I hope to lay before the scientific world towards the end of this year. There is not now in my mind the least doubt, that the former greater extension of glaciers in NZ. was due not to depression and the lowering of the atmosphere, but to upheaval through which the mean height of land came above the perpetual snow line and by which the extracted moisture from the prevailing westerly winds was converted into snow which filled for many miles any depression and plateau amongst the craggy peaks giving rise to enormous glaciers.
Many terraces and lines in our Alps which I mistook formerly for horizontal ones are only apparently so whilst the few really horizontal ones are derived from local lakes. I sent to our mutual friend Dr Hooker an account of a West coast glacier perhaps you will see it and you will agree with me that it [lends] to my strange conclusions. I followed with great interest your lectures on heat3 but was unable to see them all, being so often absent from town and not being able to obtain afterwards the English papers with the report of them, and I may assure you, that not only did I take great interest in them, but should be delighted to receive them from your hands—Any book or pamphlets etc with which you may gratify me, will reach me safely if you want to send it to Miss S. Dobson Collet4. 13 Lodowick Terrace Regents park London NW.
Since I wrote last a new pass across the Alps at the head of the river Waimakariri5 has been discovered by Mr Arthur Dobson,6 formally my assistant surveyor and an energetic young man. This pass is about 3000 feet above the sea, leads towards the sources of the Arahaura7 and is bounded on both sides by mountains covered with perpetual snow from which large glaciers descend. It is the same pass of which I spoke in several reports of mine as existing according to Maori information. So you see, that with every year we advance more and more with the knowledge of our interior and what formerly was only an unknown wilderness begins already now to offer us assistance in explaining many phenomena in physical geography & geology which within the last few years were only imperfectly understood.
I shall be delighted to hear again from you & with best wishes believe me
my dear Sir ever yours | very sincerely | Julius Haast
Prof J. Tyndall FRS | etc | London.
RI MS JT/1/H/6
your letter of July last: letter 2021.
roches moutoneés: rock formations created by glacial erosion, resembling ‘sheepbacks’ (French).
your lectures on heat: see letter 1920, n. 4.
S. Dobson Collet: Sophia Dobson Collet (1822–94), an English feminist freethinker and writer (ODNB). She was an aunt of Haast’s friend in New Zealand, Arthur Dudley Dobson (see n. 6). Haast must have had mail sent from London to New Zealand through these friends.
river Waimakariri: a large river on the South Island of New Zealand.
Mr Arthur Dobson: Arthur Dudley Dobson (1841–1934), a pioneer surveyor, engineer, and explorer. He is best known for taking the first party of Europeans to New Zealand’s West Coast and assisting on provincial explorations (Suzanne Starky, ‘Dobson, Arthur Dudley and Dobson, Edward’, in Dictionary of New Zealand Biography (first published in 1990). Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/1d14/dobson-arthur-dudley (accessed 20 November 2019)).
Arahaura: the Arahura river on the South Island of New Zealand.
Please cite as “Tyndall2087,” in Ɛpsilon: The John Tyndall Collection accessed on