576 



as hard as horn, internally. As the seeds advance towards maturity, the spadix he- 

 comes green. The young, unfolded leaves of this cahhage-tree, rise perpendicularly, 

 in the centre of the crest. In this state, they are used for making brooms ; those still 

 iinprotruded, and remaining enclosed within the sheaths of the older leaves, form a 

 white mass, as thick as a man's arm ; they are eaten raw, boiled or pickled. In a raw 

 state, they taste like a nut, and boiled, they resemble artichoke-bottoms. The seeds 

 furnish food for the wood-quest, a large species of pigeon, which has a bronzed head 

 and breast, and is white underneath, and principally slate-coloured on the back and 

 wings. This bird is so unconscious of danger, as to sit till taken by a noose at the end 

 of a stick ; when one is shot, anothe r will sometimes remain on the same bough, till 

 itself also is fired at. We measured a Norfolk Island pine, twenty-three feet, and an- 

 other twenty-seven feet, in circumference. Some of them are nearly two hundred feet 

 high. The timber is not of good quality, but is used in building ; it soon perishes 

 when exposed to the weather. This is said to be the case with all the other kinds of 

 wood on the island. Norfolk Island iron-wood, Olea apetala, is the only other sort re- 

 puted to be worth using. No fences of wood are expected to stand above three years. 

 Vegetation is rapid in this fine climate, but decay is rapid also. There are very few 

 dead logs lying in the bush." — p. 264. 



On the 2nd of April our traveller explored a gully on the north side 

 of the island, and found it " shaded by forest and abounding in ferns 

 and young palms;" he also observed four orchideous epiphytes on the 

 upper branches of the trees. Peperomias and ferns were plentiful ; 

 the former " are spreading green plants allied to pepper ; " they were 

 growing on moist rocks, " on the dark sides of which Trichomanes 

 BauerianuH}, a membranaceous fern of great beauty, forms tufts ex- 

 ceeding a foot in height." On the rocks of the south coast he found 

 Asplenium difforme, a fern resembling Asplenium marinum : a little 

 way inland the leaves of this fern are more divided, and it varies 

 through every intervening form, until, in the woods in the interior of 

 the island, the leaves are separated into such narrow segments, that 

 the fructification becomes marginal, and in this state the plant is call- 

 ed Coenopteris odontites. On the 4th, after visiting a gang of invalids 

 employed in stone-breaking, J. Backhouse explored a place called the 

 Cascade, fringed in places with copses and straggling tree-ferns. A 

 little brook winds from the woody hills to an open valley, formerly in- 

 habited by settlers, whose chimneys were still standing, and whose 

 orchards, now run wild, have spread grape-vines, lemons, figs and 

 guavas all around. 



"Their sugar-caues have also become naturalized, and border the streamlet thick- 

 ly, till it falls over a basaltic rock, about twenty feet high, decorated with ferns, and a 

 variety of other plants. Here the brook is again narrowed by woody hills, and mar- 

 gined by luxuriant plants of the broad, sedgy-leafed New Zealand flax, and water- 

 cress, till it emerges on an open, flat, basaltic promontory, from the very point of which 

 it falls, about twenty feet, to the sea beach, where it is lost among the large, rounded, 



