52 Transactions. — Miscellaneous. 



three rapids, but the portages are easy, and I hitend to take a 

 canoe up there next summer, for I could see a kindly-looking 

 valley turning to the north-east, and I may be able to go a 

 long way up it. 



Paradise-ducks are very scarce here, because there is no 

 grass for them . Even at Goose Cove — which may have got its 

 name from them — where there is some level land, there is no 

 grass, as it is all grown over with scrub ; and there are neither 

 ducks nor geese there now, only a few redbills and swans. Up 

 in Wet Jacket it was quite pitiful to see a pair of paradise 

 trying to rear a family on a few square yards of grass. If I 

 had a few pairs of goats I think I could provide the ducks 

 with grass-plots in suitable places at the ends of bays. It is 

 not a heavy task to dispose of some of this scrub ; and surface- 

 sown rye-grass grows here more quickly and richer than I ever 

 saw, but there are hundreds of seedling forest-trees and shrubs 

 growing up among it, so that some animal is required to keep 

 them in check that the grass may continue. In old England, 

 Darwin mentions how pines and other forest-trees sprang up 

 when the animals were excluded, and so it may be in any 

 country as it is here. The scrub follows down the a'lluvial 

 land at the mouths of creeks, covering every foot, and even 

 reaching out over the tide, so that nothing else has a chance 

 under present circumstances. There are often little natural 

 clearings at landslips and uprooted trees, which seem insignifi- 

 cant, but great changes are often wrought by long-continued 

 trifles. This mountain-bush, being of great extent and un- 

 known resources, may contain room for another Switzerland, 

 with its hardy mountaineers. But now, with its superfluity 

 of damp and sandflies, it is about the most iniserable and use- 

 less place that man ever set his foot in, and he cannot have 

 the heart to start reclaiming it from its present state ; but the 

 quadrupeds may be the pioneers, as they have been in nearly 

 every other country, and then the men can take it up. We 

 often see where the sealers have rolled aside the stones on the 

 beach to land their boats, and perhaps a level place with a 

 grove of young trees on the site of their old camp, but not a 

 yard of open ground ; yet two of those parties lived here for 

 about a year. And two vessels were built in Dusky Sound, 

 but we have not yet found where their shipyards were, for 

 perhaps not a trace remains. When we came into the little 

 harbour on Pigeon Island the stones were rolled aside on the 

 beach, but there was not room above high water to land our 

 stores until we made a clearing. We thought that no one 

 ever lived there before until we cleared and dug the ground, 

 when- we found it neai'ly paved with Maori ovens. In Cascade 

 Harbour there is the site of a hut with an iron chimney which 

 may have been ten or twelve years deserted, yet the floor of 



