Page:Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute - Volume 1 (2nd ed.).djvu/202

168 company with that gentleman, whose friendship it was my privilege to enjoy during several years, I ascended several of the mountain ranges of the Wairau and Upper Awatere in search of alpine novelties. It was impossible to have a pleasanter companion, and no one could be more enthusiastic in the cultivation of natural science, or bring to the task a mind better stored with all the requisite knowledge. Seated round the camp fire at night, his extensive and minute acquaintance with a wide range of subjects, his knowledge of art and science, and his experience, both of men and things, derived from enlightened observation in many countries, combined, with a cheerful temper, a large fund of anecdote, and a genial philosophy, to render his conversation most entertaining and instructive. While he lived he was one of the chief contributors to our knowledge of the botany of the country. What he did in this way he accomplished chiefly during intervals of leisure snatched from the duties of a responsible office. With his time entirely at his disposal, as it latterly was, and the whole energies of his mind given to the task, a great deal more might have been looked for from his researches; and an irreparable calamity befell the cause of science in this colony when Dr. Sinclair, then engaged in exploring the botany of the central portions of this island, lost his life in the Rangitata River.

Regarded as a whole, I should say that the vegetation of the South Island was less luxuriant than that of the North. In the former, we miss altogether some of the most handsome and striking plants which are to be met with in the latter, more particularly in its northern portions. That species of Metrosideros, for instance, called by the natives Pohutukawa, so beautiful an object in the middle of summer, bending over the salt waters of some sheltered harbour, and gorgeous with its bundles of crimson filaments, is not to be met with in the South. The noble Kauri, one of the stateliest and commercially the most valuable of the New Zealand forest trees, is not found to the south of Mercury Bay. The Puriri (Vitex littoralis), wider in its range, and abundant about Taranaki, I have never met with on the south side of Cook Strait. Charmed with its rich green foliage, and the beauty alike of its pink blossom and cherry-like fruit, I have carried with me young plants, and endeavoured to naturalize it in my shrubberies at Nelson, but could not succeed, for the frosts of our winter nights proved fatal to its delicate organization. Another familiar form which one misses in the south is the shrubby Pomaderris, which clothes the ground so abundantly in the neighbourhood of Auckland and elsewhere. But if the South Island be less abundantly furnished with trees and shrubs than the North, it possesses, in its wide extent of pasture, and in the abundance of grasses which clothe its eastern plains, and the downs and hilly slopes of its interior, a more than ample compensation; for these pastures are a source