I go into the garden and gather a few peascods for seed till the horses should come up.  Then Cook, the shepherd, says that a fire has sprung up on the other side of the river.  Who could have lit it?  Probably someone who had intended coming to my place on the preceding evening and has missed his way, for there is no track of any sort between here and Phillips’s.  In a quarter of an hour he lit another fire lower down, and by that time, the horses having come up, Haast and myself—­remembering how Dr. Sinclair had just been drowned so near the same spot—­think it safer to ride over to him and put him across the river.  The river was very low and so clear that we could see every stone.  On getting to the river-bed we lit a fire and did the same on leaving it; our tracks would guide anyone over the intervening ground.

Besides his occupation with the sheep, he found time to play the piano, to read and to write.  In the library of St. John’s College, Cambridge, are two copies of the Greek Testament, very fully annotated by him at the University and in the colony.  He also read the Origin of Species, which, as everyone knows, was published in 1859.  He became “one of Mr. Darwin’s many enthusiastic admirers, and wrote a philosophic dialogue (the most offensive form, except poetry and books of travel into supposed unknown countries, that even literature can assume) upon the Origin of Species” (Unconscious Memory, close of Chapter I).  This dialogue, unsigned, was printed in the Press, Canterbury, New Zealand, on 20th December, 1862.  A copy of the paper was sent to Charles Darwin, who forwarded it to a, presumably, English editor with a letter, now in the Canterbury Museum, New Zealand, speaking of the dialogue as “remarkable from its spirit and from giving so clear and accurate an account of Mr. D’s theory.”  It is possible that Butler himself sent the newspaper containing his dialogue to Mr. Darwin; if so he did not disclose his name, for Darwin says in his letter that he does not know who the author was.  Butler was closely connected with the Press, which was founded by James Edward FitzGerald, the first Superintendent of the Province, in May, 1861; he frequently contributed to its pages, and once, during FitzGerald’s absence, had charge of it for a short time, though he was never its actual editor.  The Press reprinted the dialogue and the correspondence which followed its original appearance on 8th June, 1912.

On 13th June, 1863, the Press printed a letter by Butler signed “Cellarius” and headed “Darwin among the Machines,” reprinted in The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912).  The letter begins: