A New Zealander writing in London may be forgiven if he begins by warning English readers not to expect in the aspect of New Zealand either a replica of the British Islands or anything resembling Australia.  The long, narrow, mountainous islands upon which Abel Jansen Tasman stumbled in December, 1642, are so far from being the antipodes of Britain that they lie on an average twelve degrees nearer the equator.  Take Liverpool as a central city of the United Kingdom; it lies nearly on the 53rd parallel of north latitude.  Wellington, the most central city of New Zealand, is not far from the 41st parallel of southern latitude.  True, New Zealand has no warm Gulf Stream to wash her shores.  But neither is she chilled by east winds blowing upon her from the colder half of a continent.  Neither her contour nor climate is in the least Australian.  It is not merely that twelve hundred miles of ocean separate the flat, rounded, massive-looking continent from the high, slender, irregular islands.  The ocean is deep and stormy.  Until the nineteenth century there was absolutely no going to and fro across it.  Many plants are found in both countries, but they are almost all small and not in any way conspicuous.  Only one bird of passage migrates across the intervening sea.  The dominating trees of Australia are myrtles (called eucalypts); those of New Zealand are beeches (called birches), and various species of pines.  The strange marsupials, the snakes, the great running birds, the wild dogs of Australia, have no counterpart in New Zealand.  The climate of Australia, south of Capricorn, is, except on the eastern and south-eastern coast, as hot and dry as the South African.  And the Australian mountains, moderate in height and flattened, as a rule, at the summit, remind one not a little of the table-topped elevations so familiar to riders on the veldt and karroo.  The western coast of New Zealand is one of the rainiest parts of the Empire.  Even the drier east coast only now and then suffers from drought On the west coast the thermometer seldom rises above 75 deg. in the shade; on the other not often above 90 deg..  New Zealand, too, is a land of cliffs, ridges, peaks, and cones.  Some of the loftier volcanoes are still active, and the vapour of their craters mounts skyward above white fields of eternal snow.  The whole length of the South Island is ridged by Alpine ranges, which, though not quite equal in height to the giants of Switzerland, do not lose by comparison with the finest of the Pyrenees.

No man with an eye for the beautiful or the novel would call Australia either unlovely or dull.  It is not, however, a land of sharp and sudden contrasts:  New Zealand is.

The Australian woods, too, are park-like:  their trees, though interesting, and by no means without charm, have a strong family likeness.  Their prevailing colours are yellow, brown, light green, and grey.  Light and heat penetrate them everywhere.