SIGHT-SEEING IN NEW ZEALAND. 313 



water-cress of our streams was taken there and planted in the 

 colonial streams. It forthwith grew into such luxuriant masses 

 that it actually choked up the water courses, and some streams 

 that I saw had been obliged to leave their native beds and seek 

 other outlets. The dandelion and the dock, so innocuous with 

 us, are there rampaging weeds, that take everything to them- 

 selves. The Scotch thistle, a national emblem at home, is there 

 a national curse. The outlook in many cultivated districts 

 reminded me of the disheartening prospect which must have 

 opened out before our unfortunate ancestor, late of the Garden 

 of Eden, when he saw the ground that had been cursed for his 

 sake. " In sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life. 



/ / 



Thorns and thistles shall it bring forth unto thee." 



Of the national bearing of the rabbit plague I will have some- 

 what to say later. But in climbing Ben Lomond from Queens- 

 town on lake Wakatipu, I saw such astonishing numbers of these 

 little brown pests, that I cannot resist telling something more 

 about them here. The people informed me that four years 

 before, there was not a rabbit there ; yet now they overrun the 

 whole country. They were scampering away before me all the 

 way up that climb of 6,000 feet ; and I left some figures on the 

 rocks up there in geometrical progression and the laws of Mal- 

 thus. Great quantities of these animals are dressed and canned 

 in the colonies. Rabbit pie was one of the tiresome dishes on 

 the long home voyage. At some of the sheep ranches the 

 would-be scientists of another hemisphere have repeated the 

 German Professor Koch's experiments on rabbits. They have 

 caught some, inoculated them with tubercular consumption, and 

 then let them go. In the close underground life they lead, this 

 disease is communicated from one to another until they die off 

 by thousands. Since returning home I have seen an account of 

 the shipment of some hundreds of weasels to New Zealand as 

 an antidote for rabbits. This is nature's means of killing off a 

 too prolific race ; and whether it is or not, it seems to me infi- 

 nitely more merciful than dosing them with tuberculosis, and 

 making them die off in such an inhumanly human manner. 



