Page:Castaway on the Auckland Isles (IA castawayonauckla01musg).pdf/171

Rh midst of a boisterous ocean, in a very high latitude for that hemisphere, and far removed from any tract of land but the islands of New Zealand, they proved, as was expected, to contain amongst many new species some of peculiar interest. Possessing no mountains rising to the limits of perpetual snow, and few rocks or precipices, the whole land seemed covered with vegetation; a low forest skirts all the shores, succeeded by a broad belt of brushwood, above which, to the summit of the hills, extend grassy slopes. On a closer inspection of the forest it is found to be composed of a dense thicket of stag-headed trees, so gnarled and stunted by the violence of the gales as to afford an excellent shelter for a luxuriant undergrowth of bright green feathery ferns, and several gay flowered herbs. With much to delight the eye, and an extraordinary amount of new species to occupy the mind, there is here a want of any of those trees or shrubs to which the voyager has been accustomed in the north; and one cannot help feeling how much greater the pleasure would be to find new kinds of the pine, the birch, willow, or the oak, than those remarkable trees which have no allies in the northern hemisphere, and the mention of which, suggesting no familiar form to compare them with at home, can interest few but the professed botanist. Eighty flowering plants were found—a small number, but consisting of species more remarkable for their beauty and novelty than the flora of any other country can show, no less than fifty-six being hitherto undescribed, and one-half of the whole peculiar to this group, as far as is at present known.'

on the island have been stated by some as rising to 70 feet in height, by others only to 30 feet. Captain Musgrave gives the latter. Both may be right, for they are most generally found to have been overturned by the strong gales, which is readily done, from the nature of the soil they grow in—a very deep, light, peaty earth, which affords but little support for the roots. The trunks attain a diameter of four and five feet at times, but, from