• ; ESSAY 
ON THE BOTANY, GEOGRAPHIC AND CECONOMIC, OF 
THE NORTH ISLAND OF THE NEW ZEALAND 
GROUP. 
§i. PRELIMINARY. 
]. Jt is very nearly a century since the Botany of New Zealand first 
became known to science. On the north-west shore of Poverty Bay, in 
the evening of Sunday the 8th of October, 1769, (being early summer,) 
Sir Joseph Banks and Dr. Solander (then first landing with Captain 
Cook,) had the pleasure and privilege of beholding and gathering the 
first floral specimens of (what they then believed to be) the vegetation 
of the great terra australis incognita. That was truly a Botanical eera; 
when the cpieen of natural science (through the efforts of the immortal 
Linmeus and his zealous disciples, aided by their royal patrons and 
promoters), vigorously flourished, and bore those pleasing and useful 
fruits which have come down with such good results to our own times. 
All those early Naturalists in the New Zealand field, to whom her Flora 
is so much indebted—Banks, Solander, Sparmann, and the two Forsters 
(father and son), were all disciples and correspondents of Linnaeus.— 
When the writer, in January, 1888, first visited those forests at “Howa- 
howa” (Uaua) Tolaga Bay, (whence the earliest specimens of fine 
plants peculiar to New Zealand were first obtained by those Botanists,) 
a deep reverential undescribable feeling stole over him, on treading the 
same ground which Banks and Solander and Cook had trod, and on 
viewing the remarkable cliffs and trees, on which they had often gazed 
and visited and sketched. A feeling, heightened, doubtless, through 
conversing with the few old New Zealanders still dwelling there, who 
had seen and recollected those patriarchs of British enterprise in New 
Zealand. This present year of grace, 1804, has been lately signalized 
by Great Britain and the civilized world as that of the Tercentenary 
Commemoration of the immortal British Poet “of all nations and of all 
time”; and, surely, five years hence, the Colonists of New Zealand will 
suitably commemorate the Centenary landing of the adventurous and 
MUSEUM OF VICTORIA 
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