162 
There are eight kinds of whales, two of dolphins, and three of 
seals. The latter are growing scarcer from year to year. The 
sea-bear (KekenoJ lias probably ceased to select the North Island 
for its home; it is only the rugged and uninhabited Southwest 
Coast of South Island, that still continues to afford it sufficient soli- 
tude for cubbing, and haunts sufficiently favourable for the gambols 
of the other seals. 
Pigs and cattle are introduced into New Zealand and have 
rapidly propagated throughout the land. The pig was the most 
valuable gift made by the first discoverers to a people, whose 
chief food was fern-root ( Pteris esculenta ) , and who besides a few 
birds and fishes had no other animal food than the wild dog and 
the little rat. The pig lives with and by the side of man in his 
wildest, rudest natural state; it is a great addition to his means 
of subsistence, without interfering with his ordinary mode of living, 
while the possession of cattle depends on the existence of a more ad- 
vanced stage of civilization. Cattle and swine run wild in various 
districts of the islands, and it is astonishing, to what numbers 
the wild pigs are multiplying. They find an excellent and every- 
where plentiful food in the fern-roots, which formerly served the 
Maoris as a chief article of food. They retire shyly from the 
immediate vicinity of the settlements, because the settlers hunt them 
down energetically; but they congregate in the yet uninhabited 
valleys in a truly enormous number. The Wangapeka valley in 
the Province of Nelson I saw for miles up and down literally 
ploughed up by thousands of such wild pigs. They are nearly 
all black. Their extermination is sometimes contracted for by ex- 
perienced hunters, and it is a fact that three men in 20 months 
upon an area of 250,000 acres killed not less than 25,000 of them ; 
they moreover pledged themselves to kill 15,000 more. Where the 
wild pigs are very numerous, they do a great deal of damage to 
sheep-breeding,. 
Beside the domestic mammalia introduced by the Europeans, 
there arc moreover some involuntarily imported vermin, that fol- 
low man most pertinaciously wherever he sets his foot. The 
