Preface to the English Edition. 
Already when the German original was published, it was 
my most earnest desire, that this work should also appear in 
an English edition for the purpose of facilitating its circulation 
in the Colony and in England. The accomplishment of this 
wish has now been rendered possible by the intervention of 
the General Assembly of New Zealand, which, during their 
session in 1866, voted in a most liberal manner a contribution 
towards the cost of the English work by the purchase of 500 
copies of the same. I trust that I may be allowed to express 
here my most sincere thanks to the General Assembly and 
Government of New Zealand, for this farther proof of their 
kind interest in the undertaking. 
The English edition, as now presented, is not a mere trans- 
lation of the German original. A great portion of the matter 
in the German work, such as the chapter on the History of 
the Colonisation, on the Maori war, on the Maori poetry, and 
on the statistics of New Zealand, was intended exclusively for 
German readers, to whom the numerous English works on New 
Zealand, treating at length upon these subjects, are often in- 
accessible. In these chapters I could have offered nothing new 
to the English public. I have therefore entirely omitted them 
in the English edition, and have instead rewritten and enlarged 
the chapters on the Physical Geography and Geology. In the 
