Under this head I propose to enumerate those substances that have a practical value to the immediate necessities of life, and which are more or less connected with geology. A full consideration in detail of many of them falls more into the department of the chemist than that of the geologist, for their exact value and uses can only be arrived at by analysis. The following account, therefore, only professes to describe what I have learnt from my own observations, and from the publications of previous observers, especially from the appendix A to the Jurors’ Reports and Awards of the New Zealand Exhibition held in Dunedin in 1865, which contains a fund of information on the economic productions of Otago to which little has since been added.