EUROPEAN OCCUPATION 



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ditions. No doubt some few species will become extinct; but these 

 will be mostly plants whose distribution was local and confined even 

 when Europeans first arrived here ; and probably all will be species 

 that have for some time been tending towards extinction, and whose 

 final exit has thus been hastened. I cannot call to mind a single case 

 of a plant known to be widely distributed when settlement com- 

 menced that is at present in any danger of extinction. Species have 

 been banished from cultivated districts, of course, but they are still 

 abundant in other situations, and probably there will always be a 

 sufficient area of unoccupied and uncultivated lands to afford them a 

 secure home. 



Speaking generally, I am inclined to believe that the struggle 

 between the naturalised and the native floras will result in a limitation 

 of the range of the native species rather than in their actual extermina- 

 tion. We must be prepared to see many plants once common become 

 comparatively rare, and possibly a limited number I should not 

 estimate it at more than a score or two may altogether disappear, 

 to be only known to us in the future by the dried specimens preserved 

 in our museums. 



Perhaps the most emphatic testimony as to the staying power of 

 the indigenous vegetation is that borne by Dr Cockayne in his 

 Ecological Studies in Evolution (p. 32), where he says: 



There have been recorded for New Zealand up to the present time 

 some 555 species of introduced plants, but less than 180 can be considered 

 common, while others are local, rare, or even not truly established as wild 

 plants. Many at first sight appear better suited to the soil and climate 

 than are the indigenous species, and over much of the land they give the 

 characteristic stamp to the vegetation; but this is only the case where 

 draining, cultivation, constant burning of forest, scrub, and tussock, and the 

 grazing of a multitude of domestic animals have made absolutely new edaphic 

 conditions which approximate to those of Europe, and where it is no wonder 

 that the European invader can replace the aboriginal. On the other hand, 

 although this foreign host is present in its millions, and notwithstanding 

 abundant winds and land-birds (introduced, not native birds), the indigenous 

 vegetation is still virgin and the introduced plants altogether absent where 

 grazing animals have no access and where fires have never been. On certain 

 sub-alpine herb-fields the indigenous form of the dandelion (Taraxacum 

 officinale, Wigg.) is abundant, and yet the introduced form, with its readily 

 wind-borne fruit, has not gained a foothold, nor even the abundant 

 Hypochceris radicata, L., though it may be in thousands on the neighbouring 

 tussock pasture, less than one mile away. On Auckland Island, introduced 

 plants occur only in the neighbourhood of the depots for castaways, but 

 on Enderby Island, where there are cattle, they are much more widely 

 spread. Even where the rain forest has been felled or burnt, and cattle 

 etc., are kept away, it is gradually replaced by indigenous trees and shrubs 

 i.e., in localities where the rain-fall is sufficient. 



