244 TUTIRA 



simultaneously. Only those who have spent a lifetime noting the estab- 

 lishment of an alien flora can fully appreciate the multitudinous channels 

 by which seeds can be carried, the impossibility of precise verification of 

 their journeyings. The writer does not dare to make positive pro- 

 nouncements, he has watched too long and seen too much to dog- 

 matise. A notice, therefore, more or less detailed, has been given of 

 each plant named, and the reader allowed to draw his own conclusions. 

 The appearance of new species from time to time has been carefully 

 noted. Since the afternoon of the 4th September '82, when I spotted 

 the blossoming dandelions, golden in the turf of the Twenty Acre 

 paddock, the rise, decline, and, in almost every case, the fall of every 

 weed has been .watched. I may say, indeed, with a fair degree of 

 confidence, that not one has been overlooked. To begin with, probably 

 change of every sort has been more clearly watched on Tutira than on 

 most sheep-stations. I myself, for thirty-six years, have been on the 

 prowl, seeking, like St Paul's men of Athens, for something new. Harry 

 Young has been an admirable second ; the shepherds of the place, cog- 

 nisant of my crotchets, I hope no more sinister word has been applied, 

 have also been more or less on the qui vive. Twenty thousand acres, 

 nevertheless, will sound at first hearing a big patch of ground about 

 which to make so confident an assertion. Readers will, however, recollect 

 that in early times four-fifths of the station still lay in deep fern, amongst 

 which no other growths could live. They will, furthermore, have learnt 

 from the chapter on fern-crushing that outlying corners and poorer 

 portions of a paddock almost at once reverted to bracken. In practice 

 a comparatively small portion of the station supplied the weeds enume- 

 rated. Then, again, in this residue of the run 90 per cent of aliens have 

 appeared about the homestead, the gardens, orchards, garden-paths, and 

 roads. Lastly, as nearly all aliens watched on Tutira have increased in 

 the ratio of unit, hundred, and hundred thousand, many species have 

 been impossible to miss. It may have been easy to pass by the unit, 

 the second year's spread could hardly have been so overlooked. The 

 attention of the most unobservant could not but have been drawn to the 

 hundred thousand stage. 



Guns who have shot rabbits in cover not yet withered by frost and 

 rain, know the gain of a cubit or so added to a man's stature ; that 

 advantage, too, has been mine the advantage of height. An immense 

 proportion of my life has been spent on horseback ; from the saddle it 



