CHAP. XXII.] THE FLORA OF NEW ZEALAND. 



467 



possessed only the rudiments of its existing mixed flora, derived 

 from three distinct sources. Some important fragments of the 

 typical Australian vegetation had reached it across the marine 

 strait, and had spread widely owing to the soil, climate and 

 general conditions being exactly suited to it ; from the north and 

 north-east a tropical vegetation of Polynesian type had occupied 

 suitable areas in the north ; while the extension southward of 

 the Tasmanian peninsula, accompanied, probably, as now, with 

 lofty mountains, favoured the immigration of south-temperate 

 forms from whatever Antarctic lands or islands then existed. 

 The marsupial fauna had not yet reached this eastern land, 

 which was, however, occupied in the north by some ancestral 

 struthious birds, which had entered it by way of New Guinea 

 through some very ancient continental extension, and of which 

 the emu, the cassowaries, the extinct Dromornis of Queensland, 

 and the moas and kiwis of New Zealand, are the modified 

 descendants. 



The Origin of the Australian element in the New Zealand Flora. 

 — We have now brought down the history of Australia, as 

 deduced from its geological structure and the strongly marked 

 features of its flora, to the period when New Zealand was first 

 brought into close connection with it, by means of a great north- 

 western extension of that country, which, as already explained 

 in our last chapter, is so clearly indicated by the form of the 

 sea bottom (See Map, p. 443). The condition of New Zealand 

 previous to this event is very obscure. That it had long existed 

 as a more or less extensive land is indicated by its ancient 

 sedimentary rocks ; while the very small areas occupied by 

 Jurassic and Cretaceous deposits, imply that much of the present 

 land was then also above the sea-level. The country had pro- 

 bably at that time a scanty vegetation of mixed Antarctic and 

 Polynesian origin ; ^ but now, for the first time, it would be open 



^ In Dr. Hector's address as President of the Wellington Philosophical 

 Society, in 1872, he refers to the fluviatile deposits of early Tertiary or 

 Cretaceous age as containing valuable deposits of coal, and adds: — " In 

 the associated sandstones and shales the flora of the period has been in 

 many cases well preserved, and shows that at a period anterior to the 

 deposit of the marine stratum the New Zealand area was clothed with a 



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