ON THE 
GEOGRAPHIC AND ECONOMIC BOTANY 
OF THE 
NORTH ISLAND OF NEW ZEALAND. 
By WILLIAM COLENSO, F.L.S. 
[Written for the New Zealand Exhibition, 1865.] 
I. PRELIMINARY. 
1. It is very nearly a century since the botany of New Zealand first 
became known to science. On the north-west shore of Poverty Bay, in the 
evening of Sunday, the Sth of October, 1769, being early summer, Sir Joseph 
Banks and Dr. Solander (then first landing with Captain Cook) had the 
pleasure and privilege of beholding and gathering the first floral specimens 
of what they then believed to be the vegetation of the great terra australis 
incognita. That was truly a botanical æra; when the queen of natural 
science—through the efforts of the immortal Linnæus and his zealous 
disciples, aided by their royal patrons and promoters—vigorously flourished, 
and bore those pleasing and useful fruits which have come down with such 
good results to our own times. All those early naturalists in the New 
Zealand field, to whom her flora is so much indebted—Banks, Solander, 
Sparrman, and the two Forsters (father and son), were disciples and cor- 
respondents of Linnæus. When the writer, in January, 1838, first visited 
those forests at “ Howahowa" (Uaua), Tolaga Bay (whence the earliest 
specimens of fine plants peculiar to New Zealand were first obtained by 
those botanists), a deep reverential indescribable feeling stole over him on 
treading the same ground which Banks and Solander and Ccok had trod, and 
on viewing the remarkable cliffs and trees on which they had often gazed and 
visited and sketched—a feeling heightened doubtless through conversing 
with the few old New Zealanders still dwelling there, who have seen and 
recollected those patriarchs of British enterprise in New Zealand. This 
present year of grace, 1864, has been lately signalized by Great Britain and 
the civilized world as that of the tercentenary commemoration of the im- 
mortal British poet “ of all nations and of all time;" and surely, five years 
hence, the colonists of New Zealand will suitably te the centenary 
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