A NEW FLORA IN THE MAKING. 145 
Since the advent of the British, however, a great change has 
overtaken the vegetation. The number of species growing wild, 
and which will continue to grow wild, has increased to such an 
extent that no one, however well versed in floristic botany, had he 
not New Zealand botanical literature for a guide, could possibly 
say whether this plant, or that, was indigenous or the contrary. 
To such a degree have certain foreign species entered into plant- 
associations of an apparently primitive stamp, such as tussock- 
grassland, swamp, rock associations, manuka thicket, or sandhill, to 
quote a few examples, that these foreign species appear just as much 
parts of the association as do the indigenous plants themselves. 
Thus it is clear that, dating from the first visit of Captain Cook, 
a new flora and a new vegetation has been arising in New Zealand, 
at first slowly, but later by leaps and bounds, and that its evolution 
is still in progress. Carefully conducted inquiries into this matter 
are of the greatest scientific and economic interest not only with 
regard to New Zealand botany, pure and applied, but also because 
they may shed much-needed light upon the evolution of floras and 
vegetation in general. 
The foreign plants now growing wild without cultivation have 
come from many lands, but by far the greater part are, as in the 
case of the human colonists, natives of Great Britain and Ireland. 
There are also Australians, North and South Americans, Africans, 
and Asiatics. Hven some New-Zealanders have moved to distant 
parts of the botanical region far from their real home. Unlike the 
ancestors of the true New Zealand plants, the aliens were not borne 
hither by winds or birds over the ocean. Neither did they travel 
slowly over ancient land-extensions now submerged, nor have they 
originated in New Zealand itself, but the ships that conveyed the 
human immigrants or their goods brought the plants also. Some 
species were purposely introduced for their economic or ornamental 
value ; others came unbidden as impurities in agricultural or garden 
seeds, in ballast of ships, in the hay or straw packing of goods, and in 
other ways. So thoroughly has the acclimatization of these plants 
succeeded that there are now about 520 species more or less firmly 
established, some 276 of these being more or less common from the 
North Cape to the Bluff, while a few are quite at home even on 
the highest mountains. Other species may be expected to come 
in course of time, but some that have arrived may die out, while 
10—Plants. 
