Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/75

 mountain ranges once existed, are now vast level plains; our present tropics were once in the frigid zone, and many islands that once existed have disappeared. No doubt the original inhabitants of North America found their way there from the westward, by means which we cannot now clearly understand New Zealand was originally a very poor country; it had almost no animals, and its vegetation was scanty. All the sheep, cattle, horses, hogs, fowls, deer, etc., were brought here; when Captain Cook was killed in the Hawaiian islands, by natives, he had been distributing live-stock in the islands of the South Seas, to benefit the inhabitants. Trout are now plentiful in the clear and rapid streams of New Zealand, but they were brought here. Before the American Revolution there were plenty of hogs in Australia, New Zealand, and the South Sea islands. The natives traded hogs to the sailors for knives, nails, hatchets, etc., and these hogs had been introduced by white men, at great expense and trouble. The white man has always been trying to help his more backward dark-skinned brother.

—Rotorua, with all its charms, becomes very tiresome after a few days. A second visit to the geyser fields is like seeing a play a second time, and we are impatient to move on. The first time you see fifteen-year-old girls, scantily dressed, diving for pennies, it is a startling sight, but in a little while you do not care for it. When two Maori women meet, they rub their foreheads together. That cere