313 



you for the imperfect manner in which it has been performed. I know that I 

 have left untouched a huge mass of matters bearing upon the question, under 

 consideration to which 1 ought, in justice to you, to have referred ; but the 

 haste with which, and the difficulties under which this lecture has been written, 

 must be my excuse both for sins of omission and of commission. I will only 

 add, that in all which is taking place around us, we see the energies of our 

 race forming a new and vigorous state. The face of the country, the life native 

 to its soil, and the aboriginal race which claimed it, are all being modified, 

 effaced, and displaced. The intrusive race has indeed wixmght mightier 

 changes in the third part of a century than the aborigines would have effected 

 had they remained for another thousand years un visited by civilized man. 



The rapidity of such changes, too, strikes the on-looker with astonishment, 

 and is inconceivable to those who have not witnessed it for themselves. In 1839 

 the " Tory " first visited Cook's Straits on a colonizing mission, and then 

 found the natives engaged in a bloody feud at Waikanae, and exhibiting the 

 most forbidding habits, natural to savage life. All was strange, wild, and 

 savage. Thirty years have elapsed since then, and already large cities have 

 risen in many parts of the Islands. Everywhere the broad sheets of the press 

 are engaged in diffusing information, and in discussing the politics and wants 

 of a civilized people, where so recently the hut of the savage was the only 

 evidence of the presence of man. The dealing, the farm, the industrious 

 settlement have displaced the scanty cultivation of the Maori, and his ephemeral 

 hut. The progress of a single year outspeeds the work of past centuries, and 

 amid the charred stumps of our hill-side forests, and the rough clearings of our 

 farms, fancy may trace the handsome villas, and luxurious plantations of 

 wealthy landed proprietors. Already we have seen the iron horse doing its 

 work in the colony, whilst the mind of the people is intent on extending the 

 range of its work to the immense tracts of rich country, still too distant, for 

 full value, from the centres of population. If, by the intrusion of the vigorous 

 races of Europe, smiling farms and busy marts are to take the place of the 

 rough clearing and hut of the savage, and the millions of a populous country, 

 with the arts and letters, the matured policy, and the ennobling impulses of a 

 free people, are to replace the few thousands of the scattered tribes now living 

 in an apparently aimless and unprogressive state, even the most sensitive 

 philanthropist may learn to look with resignation, if not with complacency, on 

 the extinction of a people which, in the past had accomplished so imperfectly 

 every object of man's being. If the Maoris can, so far as wise policy and a 

 generous statesmanship can accomplish it, be admitted to an equal share with 

 the intending colonizer in all the advantages of a progressive civilization ; then 

 we may look with satisfaction at the close of that long night time during which 

 this country gave birth to no science, no philosophy, no moral teaching, and 

 hail the dawn of centuries in which it is to claim a place in the common- 

 wealth of nations, and bear a part in the accelerated progress of the human 

 race. 



(part II.) 



[Lecture delivered October 16, 1869.] 



I will now proceed to discuss, at greater length, that part of the 

 subject which more especially referred to the effects likely to be produced \ipon 

 the fauna and flora of this country, by the introduction of competing foreign 

 organisms. In order that you may be able satisfactorily to follow my obser- 

 vations, it will be necessary that I should, in the first place, call your attention 

 shortly to the divisions and classification of the organic world, and the laws 

 which govern its distribution ; and, somewhat more fully, to the views 



