ON THE CONSERVATION OF FORESTS IN NEW ZEALAND. 43 
the Maoris of Karatea, in that province, “ cutting down a beautiful 
grove of Karaka trees, to catch, roast, and eat the lizards, which are 
found in their hollows, as they had found that the lizard is the root of 
all evil!" Somewhat parallel, but on an infinitely larger and more 
disastrous scale, was the general firing of the forests in former times by 
the Maoris, who assert they were compelled to do so in order to destroy 
the Moa, which made a practice of running off with their infants under 
five years of age ! 
At one time—so long ago, however, as the sixteenth century —the in- 
habitants of the Harz district, in Germany, possessed the same ruin- 
ously liberal rights as to wood-cutting in the primitive forest, which 
the settlers of Otago now apparently enjoy. The resulting destruction 
of timber was so reckless and rapid—and so serious, moreover, in a 
district, which, unlike Otago, possesses no local coal deposits, and can 
import coal only from a great distance and at great cost—that it led 
to the enactment of the conservative and other forest-regulations, which 
have for some centuries been models for all Europe and all the world 
to imitate. 
Not until there had been a deplorable sacrifice of the valuable Teak, 
did our Indian Government concern itself to any effect with the super- 
vision of Indian forests. The arrangements it has latterly made are 
to be commended so far as they go; but they ought undoubtedly to 
have been made at a much earlier period in our Indian rule; while 
they are still defective, considering the vast area of India, and the 
nature and extent of supervision essential to the proper management of 
forests, old and new. 
The history of the extinction or disappearance of the Caledonian 
forest—that which appears at one period to have clothed all Scotland 
and its isles—furnishes certain other interesting parallels to the history 
of the disappearance or destruction of the Otago forests, and certain 
other important lessons to the Provincial Government. Here again we 
See repeated the ruinous and reckless destruction of valuable timber on 
the one hand, and, on the other, the institution of conservative regula- 
tions,—sometimes attended with penalties of an extreme kind,—zwhen 
conservation was obviously too late. It would appear that the disap- 
pearance of the Caledonian forest was partly due to climatic, in con- 
nection with geological, changes, especially to land-subsidence, as in 
Otago ; but partly also, it was undoubtedly attributable to destruction 
