7

ESSAY
ON THE BOTANY, GEOGRAPHIC AND ECONOMIC, OF
THE NORTH ISLAND OF THE NEW ZEALAND
GROUP.
I. PRELIMINARY
1. It 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 era;
when the queen of natural science (through the efforts of immortal
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, 1838, 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, 1864, has been lately signalized
by Great Britian 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