Cockaynk. — Plants of Chatham Island. 253 



some account of man's history on Chatham Island, so that it 

 can be seen what new factors he has added to the surround- 

 ings of the vegetation, and for how long a time they have been 

 influential and to what degree of power they have attained. 

 Then, having pictured as accurately as my limited investiga- 

 tions allow the primeval plant-covering in its various phases, 

 an attempt is made to pourtray the changes in that vegetation 

 which man purposely or accidentally, by means of cultivation, 

 animals, exotic plants, and fires, has brought about. All this 

 is the more interesting since it seems to me that but the 

 merest fraction of the vegetation of civilised or semi-civilised 

 portions of the Old World can be in its primeval condition* — 

 that, for example, forests, and even alpine meadows, which 

 appear to all intents and purposes primeval are but artificial 

 productions after all. But the vegetation of Chatham Island 

 has, ever since it first became isolated on that land, been, 

 prior to the advent of man, exposed to no foreign influences, 

 not even to those attacks of wild herbivorous mammals under 

 the modifying influence of which much of the vegetation of 

 the earth has been developed. 



The aborigines of Chatham Island are Polynesians, and ap- 

 pear to be merely a branch of the Maori race. According to 

 Mr. A. Shand they, before the arrival of any other people, had 

 lived on Chatham Island for about seven hundred and seventy 

 years. They did not cultivate the ground at all. The only 

 vegetable foods they made use of were the rhizome of Pteris 

 esculenta and the fruit of Corynocarjms Icevigata. Their settle- 

 ments were not confined to any one part of the island, but 

 they moved about here and there according to plentifulness of 

 food in certain localities. When the sea-birds came to lay 

 their eggs on the " clears "t in the south of the island they 

 would live in that part. So important was this article of food 

 to them that they made a sort of rude calendar based on the 

 period when any particular egg was most abundant. The egg 

 season over, they would move about the rocky portion of the 

 coast for fish, along the lakes and lagoons for eels, or they 

 would visit those places where the holes of the mutton-birds 

 most abounded; even they would visit in their large canoes the 

 neighbouring islands and rocks in search of birds. All the 

 above would have little effect on the vegetation. The dense 



* Mr. W. L. Bray writes regarding the vegetation of western Texas 

 (2, 118): "Under what may be called natural conditions to distinguish 

 them from conditions which prevail under the present era of exploitation 

 the grass-formations held their own in the perpetual struggle against 

 woody vegetation. With the advent of the cattle business, however, this 

 advantage was lost, and the present is an era of the rapid encroachment 

 of timber-formations." 



f The name " clears " is given by the white settlers to those places 

 not covered with forest. 



