﻿384 Proceedings. 



So long as unexplored fields remain accessible to research they will natu- 

 rally afibrd the strongest stimulus to the curiosity of the most active minds, 

 and, even before the grand generalisations of modern times had given those 

 studies the greater importance they now possess, they have always been found 

 peculiarly fascinating in new countries. 



But in our day such investigations have a far higher aim and importance 

 than they have ever had before. The vast mass of observations and informa- 

 tion collected in past time has in our own afforded a solid basis for general 

 laws, and has furnished the elements of speculations the most brilliant, and 

 results the most unexpected. The search after unknown or undescribed speci- 

 mens of the fauna and flora of a new country is not now a mere dry cataloguing 

 of long names — not simply making collections of curious individual specimens, 

 or searching out of minute or unimportant and perhaps fantastical varieties of 

 previously known species, interesting only to the minute student in those 

 special sciences — but, in the expanded range which thought and investigation 

 have taken, every new fact becomes a fresh link in the great chain of truth, 

 and the discovery of some appai^ently insignificant fossil, plant, or animal in 

 New Zealand may serve to establish or to discountenance theories of the 

 greatest magnitude and deepest interest, not merely to a local scientific coterie, 

 but to the whole world of science. 



In the curious spectacle of the succession of species, first developed by the 

 researches of the geologist, and which, in fact, is the very alphabet of palaeon- 

 tology, what can exceed the interest affoi-ded by seeing this great law of nature, 

 previously known only from the fossil records of the remotest past, brought 

 down even to our own day by the recent extinction of the Struthious birds 

 formerly so much developed in New Zealand ? And again, linked in the great 

 question of the distribution of species, and the resulting hypothesis either of 

 the different former disposition of sea and land, or the evolution, under similar 

 conditions, of more or less similar forms of life, who can foresee the light that 

 may arise from complete lists, even of the most humble of the plants still 

 growing on our coasts, and the comparisons these will afford with the produc- 

 tions of the islands of the north ? The correlative changes too, which are 

 occurring in infinite ramifications in our fauna and flora, and even in the 

 configuration of the country, in consequence of the disturbance of the pre- 

 viously existing order of nature by the intrusion of new organisations, are so 

 rapid that no time is to be lost if the aboriginal types and conditions are to 

 be recorded, and the order of their extinction, hybridi^iation, or metamorphosis 

 noted. 



The observation and collection of our natural fauna and flora, both living 

 and fossil, are, undoubtedly, and ought to continue to be, amongst the most 

 important and by far the most pressing objects to which the attention of these 



