254 
Our path lay between the crater -cones we had visited the 
day before, across the slip of land between the North Shore penin- 
sula and the channel on the North-coast of the Waitemata Harbour. 
Not a tree interrupted the monotony of the fern-land; only here 
and there a heifer was seen grazing, New Zealand field-larks were 
flattering about, and crickets and locusts were chirping their shrill 
notes. The soil consists of a stiff whitish clay (“pipe-clay”), being 
covered with dwarf Manuka ( Leptospermum ) , fern (Pteris escu- 
lentaj and a variety of small shrubs and tufts of grass. Nothing 
else seems to thrive in the sadly sterile soil. And yet that very 
soil bore in olden times luxuriant forest-trees. 
This circumstance gives rise to various reflections; for the sterile 
pipe-clay soil occupying such extensive tracts in* the vicinity of 
Auckland, and especially in the districts East and West of Auck- 
land, in which nothing will grow, not even grass, is a real calamity. 
The question arises: is there no means to restore to the soil the 
productive power, which it must necessarily have possessed of old, 
when it produced those towering Kauri forests , traces of which are 
plainly seen in the Kauri-gum which the natives are everywhere 
digging from the surface of that soil? Experienced farmers must 
decide this question by direct experiments. At any rate, however, 
the method usually pursued by the colonists upon the fern-heaths, 
seems to be throughout a perverse one. If immediately after the 
burning down of the woods, grass and clover-seed had been sown 
into its ashes and humus, a heavy growth of grass might perhaps 
have preserved the humus-surface of the soil. But they burn again 
and again; the winds carry off the ashes; the rain is gradually 
washing the humus away, and at last nothing remains but the 
naked clay-soil, upon which only Leptospermum and Pteris are scantily 
thriving. And in consequence of the usual burning-system, even 
these plants are not allowed to grow strong and hardy, and gra- 
dually to reproduce humus; but year after year those bushes are 
set on fire and burnt down. The owners of the ground assert that 
it was done, because the cattle was fond of browsing the tender 
shoots that spring up after the conflagration. But these also are 
