26 TUTIRA 



the former the jacket of pumice and red sand has to some extent been 

 overlaid by washings or stripped by slips. The latter remains as it 

 was centuries ago, even its leaf-mould stolen away by subcutaneous 

 erosion. 



Kahikanui swamp, lying beneath the highest marl outcrop on the 

 station, and containing washings almost wholly composed of that sub- 

 stance, is the only first-class piece of soil on the run ; in miniature it 

 resembles the far-famed flats of Poverty Bay. 



Each of these plains the one of a few dozen acres, the other of 

 many thousands has been created by alluvium carried down in flood- 

 water from hills of marl. In each case the rougher, larger particles have 

 been precipitated at the apex of the plain, whilst the finest, most highly 

 comminuted silt matter has remained in solution until dammed back 

 in the one case by Tutira lake, in the other by the waters of the Pacific. 

 The result is that although rich throughout, the physical conditions of 

 the soil at apex and base are widely dissimilar, the apex easily worked 

 and friable, the base heavy and hard set. What Herbert Spencer has 

 termed " the multiplication of effects " can further be traced in different 

 weeds, different grasses, a different permanent pasture. 



The flats alluvial is too sumptuous a term of the pumiceous 

 trough of the run do not exceed some two or three score acres, the 

 largest single patch perhaps not more than five or six acres in extent. As 

 station assets they are of no great value, it is the means by which they 

 have come into being that deserves notice here. That method is not 

 direct deposition from above, but injection from below of water charged 

 with microscopic quantities of rotted vegetation, the soakage from higher 

 slopes. These pumice alluviums in outward semblance differ but little 

 from neighbouring lands. For long, indeed, they were regarded as equally 

 worthless. It was a belief countenanced by the arid grit of the surface 

 and by the appearance of the vegetation supported thereon groves of 

 pole manuka, their bark tattered and thin, their harsh leaves brown- 

 green and prickly, a foliage yielding neither shelter from winter storms 

 nor shade from summer heats. On the other hand, covering contiguous 

 slopes, flourished luxuriantly green tutu (Coriaria ruscifolia) and koro- 

 miko (Veronica salicifolia). It was believed that their foliage was 

 creating leaf-mould on the slopes where it fell ; really its manurial value 

 soaked through the humus and sandy grit by a process of filtration to 



