s in the reign of our King Charles I., and even
then the Dutch explorer who sighted its lofty coasts did not set foot
upon them. The first European to step on to its shores did so only
when the great American colonies were beginning to fret at the ties
which bound them to England. The pioneers of New Zealand colonization,
the missionaries, whalers, and flax and timber traders, did not come
upon the scene until the years of Napoleon's decline and fall. Queen
Victoria had been on the throne for three years before the Colonial
Office was reluctantly compelled to add the Islands to an Empire which
the official mind regarded as already overgrown.

Yet so striking, varied, and attractive are the country's features, so
full of bustle, change and experiment have its few years been, that
lack of material is about the last complaint that need be made by a
writer on New Zealand. The list of books on the Colony is indeed so
long that its bibliography is a larger volume than this; and the chief
plea to be urged for this history must be its brevity--a quality none
too common in Colonial literature.

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