Most of the vegetable pests, though they may flourish abnormally for a few years in the virgin soil, soon become less vigorous.  With the growth of population even the rabbit ceases to be a serious evil, except to a few half-empty tracts.  The truth is that outside her forests and swamps New Zealand showed the most completely unoccupied soil of any fertile and temperate land on the globe.  It seems possible that until about five or six hundred years ago she had no human inhabitants whatever.  Her lakes and rivers had but few fish, her birds were not specially numerous, her grasses were not to be compared in their nourishing qualities with the English.  Of animals there were virtually none.  Even the rat before mentioned, and the now extinct dog of the Maori villages, were Maori importations from Polynesia not many centuries ago.

Not only, therefore, have English forms of life been of necessity drawn upon to fill the void spaces, but other countries have furnished their quota.  The dark eucalypt of Tasmania, with its heavy-hanging, languid leaves, is the commonest of exotic trees.  The artificial stiffness and regularity of the Norfolk Island pine, and the sweet-smelling golden blooms of the Australian wattle, are sights almost as familiar in New Zealand as in their native lands.  The sombre pines of California and the macro carpa cypress cover thousands of acres.  The merino sheep brought from Spain, via Saxony and Australia, is the basis of the flocks.  The black swan and magpie represent the birds of New Holland.  The Indian minah, after becoming common, is said to be retreating before the English starling.  The first red deer came from Germany.  And side by side with these strangers and with the trees and plants which colonists call specifically “English”—­for the word “British” is almost unknown in the Colony—­the native flora is beginning to be cultivated in gardens and grounds.  Neglected by the first generation, it is better appreciated by their children—­themselves natives of the soil.

In the north and warmer island the traveller also meets sharp contrasts.  These, however, except in the provinces of Wellington and Napier, where the Tararua-Ruahine spine plays to some extent the part taken by the Alps in the South Island, are not so much between east and west as between the coasts and the central plateau.  For the most part, all the coasts, except the south-east, are, or have been, forest-clad.  Nearly everywhere they are green, hilly and abundantly watered; windy, but not plagued with extremes of cold and heat.  Frost touches them but for a short time in mid-winter.

[Illustration:  The white Terrace, Rotomahana]