5 
IT have given to this article the title 
‘Romance of the New Zealand Flora,” but 
I am perhaps justified in saying that there 
is no genus of plant life in this dominion 
which has aroused the interest of botanists 
to so great an extent as the VERONICA, and 
it is more in relation to that genus of our 
flora that I have felt constrained to write. 
If we consult the pages of Hooker’s ‘‘Hand- 
book of the Flora of New Zealand,” we 
find the names of no fewer than 54 species 
of veronica that were discovered in this 
favoured land more than sixty years ago. 
Could we but have access to the diaries of 
the botanists whose researches were made 1n 
the early days of the colonisation of New 
Zealand, we should doubiless find recorded 
their keen appreciation of the exquisite 
beauty of many of the smaller species of 
veronica, which under the magnifying glass 
disclose an extraordinary delicacy of form in 
stem and leaf. in flower and fruit. In many 
of the species, notably in some of the whip- 
cord type, the variations are strikingly won- 
derful. To ithe naked eye there is a simi- 
larity in character that gives no promise 
of other than sameness in the whipcord 
veronicas, but put the specimens under a 
magnifying glass of ordinary strength and 
beauties and peculiarities are disclosed that 
insensibly produce in the investigator a 
feeling of profound wonder. 
e * * x 
As bearing on my belief that there is no 
form of New Zealand native vegetation that 
so attracted our early botanists as the 
veronica, I may quote from a paper on 
‘“‘Hybridisation, with reference to Variation 
in Plants,” by W TT. L. Travers, F.L.S., 
read before the Wellington Philosophical 
Society on 28th July, 1868. Mr Travers 
commenced an elaborate and thoughtful 
paper as follows:— 
Amongst the plants indigenous to the 
Middle Island of New Zealand there are 
none which range more widely, both in 
altitude and in latitude, nor which pre- 
sent a greater amount of variation, than 
the veronicas. Indeed, as Dr Hooker re- 
marks in the notes to the conspectus of 
this genus published in his ‘Handbook 
