309 



" The physical revolutions thus wrought by man have not all heen 

 destructive to human interests. Soils to which no nutritious vegetable was 

 indigenous, countries which once brought forth but the fewest products suited 

 for the sustenance and comfoi't of man, while the severity of their climate 

 created and stimulated the greatest number, and the most imperious urgency 

 of physical wants — surfaces the most rugged and intractable, and least blessed 

 with natural facilities of communication, have been made in modern times to 

 yield and contribute to the sensuous enjoyments and conveniences of civilized 

 life. The Scythia, the Thule, the Britain, the Germany, and the Gaul, which 

 the Roman writers describe in such forbidding terms, have been brought 

 almost to rival the native luxuriance and easily-won plenty of Southern Italy ; 

 and, while the fountains of oil and wine that refreshed old Greece and Syria 

 and Northern Africa, have almost ceased to flow, and the soils of those fair 

 lands are turned to thirsty and inhospitable deserts, hyperborean regions of 

 Europe have conquered, or rather compensated, the rigours of climate, and 

 attained to a material wealth and variety of product that, with all their natural 

 advantages, the granaries of the ancient world can hardly have been said 

 to have enjoyed. 



" These changes for evil and for good have not been caused by great natural 

 revolutions of the globe, nor are they by any means attributable wholly to the 

 moral and physical action or inaction of the peoples, or, in all cases, even of 

 the races that now inhabit these respective regions. They are products of a 

 complication of conflicting or coincident forces, acting through a long series of 

 generations ; here improvidence, wastefulness and wanton violence ; there, 

 foresight and wisely guided persevering industry. So far as they are the 

 purely calculated and desired results of those simple and familiar operations of 

 agriculture and of social life, which are as universal as civilization — the removal 

 of the forests which covered the soil required for the cultivation of edible fruits, 

 the drying of here and there a few acres too moist for profitable husbandly, by 

 draining off the surface waters, the substitution of domesticated and nutritious 

 for wild and unprofitable vegetable growths, the construction of roads and 

 canals and artificial harbours — they belong to the sphere of rural, commercial, 

 and political economy more properly than to geography, and hence are but 

 incidentally embraced within the range of our present enquiries, which concern 

 physical, not financial balances. I propose to examine only the greater, more 

 permanent, and more comprehensive mutations which man has produced, and 

 is producing, in earth, sea, and sky, sometimes, indeed, with a conscious 

 purpose, but for the most part, as unforeseen though natural consequences of 

 acts performed for narrower and more immediate ends. 



" The exact measurement of the geographical changes hitherto thus 

 effected is, as I have hinted, impracticable, and we possess, in relation to them, 

 the means only of qualitative, not quantitative analysis. The fact of such 

 revolutions is established partly by historical evidence, partly by analogical 

 deduction from effects produced in our own time by operations similar in 

 character to those which must have taken place in more or less remote ages of 

 human action. Both sources of information are alike defective in precision ; 

 the latter, for general reasons too obvious to require specification ; the former, 

 because the facts to which it bears testimony occurred before the habit or the 

 means of rigorously scientific observation upon any branch of physical research, 

 and especially upon climatic changes, existed." 



Bearing these general views in mind let us apply them to the case of 

 New Zealand. Before the settlement of these Islands by the Europeans they 

 were inhabited by a race of savages, barbarous beyond conception, and 

 practising rites of so foul a kind, that the very existence of such rites was often 

 doubted by modern writers. And yet these people possessed characteristics 



