24 A LETTER FROM MAORI-LAND. 



Fig. 31. — View of some of the appendages (vesicles), x 100. 

 ,, 32. — One of these still more enlarged, x 200. 



Figures 28 — 32 are after Tuffen West ; the others are drawn 

 from nature by Robert Gillo. 



a Xetter from fll>aori*=Xaiit)* 



By Thomas Steel, 



Auckland, New Zealand, 



Corresponding Member Greenock Natural History Society. 



Plate IV. 



THE land of the Maori and the Moa had long been to us a 

 kind of scientific El Dorado : a land teeming with all 

 manner of strange and weird objects of the natural world, 

 a very antipode to all that we had been accustomed to at home, 

 and stranger even than that land of strangeness, Australia. It 

 was natural, therefore, that we should have looked forward with 

 joyful anticipations when it fell to our lot to go to the storehouse 

 of the new and the wonderful, and we are glad to say that our 

 experience of New Zealand has quite come up to our expecta- 

 tions. Before coming here, we were told that we were going to a 

 beautiful and delightful country, and certainly that portion of New 

 Zealand which we have seen has fully sustained the prestige which 

 the designation, " Land of Loveliness," would lead us to expect. 

 The climate of Auckland is almost a perpetual springtime, and has 

 been described by those who have travelled much as being not 

 often equalled, and perhaps never surpassed, by that of any other 

 portion of the world. 



The province of Auckland, in the north island of New Zea- 

 land, has been called " The Wonderland of the World," and it 

 certainly does possess a full share of those curious objects which 

 are so great an attraction alike to the scientific and unscientific. 



