OK THE 



GEOGRAPHIC AND ECONOMIC BOTANY 



OP THE 



NORTH ISLAND OF NEW ZEALAND. 

 Bt WILLIAM COLENSO, F.L.S. 



\_Written for the Neto Zealand ExJdhition, 1865.] 



I. Peeliminaet. 

 1. It is very nearly a century since tlie botany of ISTew Zealand iirst 

 became known to science. On tbe north-west sbore of Poverty Bay, in the 

 evening of Sunday, the 8th 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 sera ; when the queen of natural 

 science — ^through the efforts of the immortal Linngeus 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 Linnseus. "When the v/riter, in January, 1838, first visited 

 those forests at "Howahowa" (Uaua), Tolaga Bay (whence the earliest 

 specimens of fine plants peculiar to ISTew 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 Grreat 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 commemorate the centenary 

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