CHAP. XXII.] 
THE FLORA OF NEW ZEALAND. 
4G7 
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 intp 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 ; 1 but now, for the first time, it would be open 
1 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 
H H 2 
