410 NEW ZEALAND. [CHAP. xvm. 



island, understand the language better than their parents, and can 

 get anything more readily done by the natives. 



A little before noon Messrs. Williams and Davies walked with me 

 to part of a neighbouring forest, to show me the famous kauri 

 pine. I measured one of the noble trees, and found it thirty-one 

 feet in circumference above the roots. There was another close by, 

 which I did not see, thirty-three feet ; and I heard of one no less 

 than forty feet. These trees are remarkable for their smooth 

 cylindrical boles, which run up to a height of sixty, and even 

 ninety feet, with a nearly equal diameter, and without a single 

 branch. The crown of branches at the summit is out of all propor- 

 tion small to the trunk ; and the leaves are likewise small compared 

 with the branches. The forest was here almost composed of the 

 kauri ; and the largest trees, from the parallelism of their sides, 

 stood up like gigantic columns of wood. The timber of the kauri 

 is the most valuable production of the island ; moreover, a quantity 

 of resin oozes from the bark, which is sold at a penny a pound to 

 the Americans, but its use was then unknown. Some of the New 

 Zealand forest must be impenetrable to an extraordinary degree. 

 Mr. Matthews informed me that one forest only thirty-four miles 

 in width, and separating two inhabited districts, had only lately, 

 for the first time, been crossed. He and another missionary, each 

 with a party of about fifty men, undertook to open a road ; but it 

 cost them more than a fortnight's labour! In the woods I saw very 

 few birds. With regard to animals, it is a most remarkable fact, 

 that so large an island, extending over more than 700 miles in 

 latitude, and in many parts ninety broad, with varied stations, a 

 fine climate, and land of all heights, from 14,000 feet downwards, 

 with the exception of a small rat, did not possess one indigenous 

 animal. The several species of that gigantic genus of birds, the 

 Deinornis seem here to have replaced mammiferous quadrupeds, in 

 the same manner as the reptiles still do at the Galapagos archi- 

 pelago. It is said that the common Norway rat, in the short space 

 of two years, annihilated in this northern end of the island, the 

 New Zealand species. In many places I noticed several soits of 

 weeds, which, like the rats, I was forced to own as countrymen. A 

 leek has overrun whole districts, and will prove very troublesome, 

 but it was imported as a favour by a French vessel. 1 he common 

 dock is also widely disseminated, and will, I fear, for ever remain 

 a proof of the rascality of an Englishman, who sold the seeds for 

 those of the tobacco plant. 



