326 IOWA STUDIES IN NATURAL HISTORY 
hundred inches annually. The more permanent streams are fed 
by the melting snows and glaciers of the high Alps. We passed 
many swamps and occasional lakes of great beauty. The village 
of Ross, mentioned before, is a place whose glory has departed. 
When gold failed to pay and men moved on there was left be- 
hind a mongrel population. Some of it is but the backwash of 
the great gold rush, but happily most of the people are a sturdy, 
vigorous, self-reliant and kindly folk who make the best of a 
difficult situation. An old one-armed man and a score of bent 
rheumatic and grizzly veterans of the sixties line up for the 
mail. It is their only diversion. They announce that Nick, the 
Irish wanderer, is back after a spree up the coast that cost him 
fifty pounds. To the near-by ‘‘pub’”’ they go to devour the 
mail. <A ‘‘pub’’ is a public house which dispenses liquor, and 
there are pubs and publicans a-plenty at every village and even 
at some cross-roads. 
The settlers were scattered or gathered in groups on an area 
of flat land or about a saw mill. Lumbering on a large scale 
was going on at some points. We hoped it was being done 
scientifically for nothing so imperils this district as a wholesale 
deforestation that would permit unchecked erosion of the un- 
protected slopes. We passed by several areas of burned-over 
forest land. 
Again and again as we glided through the forest we caught a 
glimpse of the snowy Alps or as we wound in and out among 
the placer dumps and abandoned sluices we caught a suggestion 
of the activities of this hundred-mile-long Gold Coast of New 
Zealand a half century ago. The tens of millions recovered 
helped make the Dominion but did little for Westland. 
This rough broken strip of coastland is dotted with huge hills 
and ridges of extremely coarse gravel borne from the mountains. 
Some of the hills attain a height of several hundred feet, are 
steep-sided and close to the mountains; they take on a foot- 
hills character and are locally known as sugarloaf hills. Mt. 
Hercules is fully a thousand feet high. These irregularities 
as well as the more level tracts are softened by a covering of 
dense bush which as we proceed southward has as yet been little 
touched by the ax. Giant trees of rimu, kahikatea, and matai 
up to three or four feet in diameter stand straight and clean; 
ti, manuka, cracker bush and others form the lower shrubs 
while black ferns (Lomaria), king ferns (Cynthia), Prince of 
