The European’s eye instinctively wanders over the foliage in search of likenesses to the flora of northern lands. He may think he detects a darker willow in the tawa, a brighter and taller yew in the matai, a giant box in the rata, a browner laburnum in the kowhai, a slender deodar in the rimu, and, by the sea, a scarlet-flowering ilex in the pohutu-kawa. The sub-alpine beech forests are indeed European, inferior though our small-leaved beeches are to the English. You see in them wide-spreading branches, an absence of underbrush and luxuriant climbers, and a steady repetition of the same sort and condition of tree, all recalling Europe. Elsewhere there is little that does this. In the guide-books you constantly encounter the word “pine,” but you will look round in vain for anything like the firs of Scotland, the maritime pines of Gascony, or the black and monotonous woods of Prussia. The nikau-palm, tree-fern, and palm-lily, the serpentine and leafy parasites, and such extraordinary foliage as that of the lance-wood, rewa-rewa, and two or three kinds of panax, add a hundred distinctive details to the broad impression of difference. [Illustration: AMONG THE KAURI] I suppose that most New Zealanders, if asked to name the finest trees of their forest, would declare for the kauri and the totara. Some might add the puriri to these. But then the average New Zealander is a practical person and is apt to estimate a forest-tree in terms of sawn timber. Not that a full-grown kauri is other than a great and very interesting tree. Its spreading branches and dark crown of glossy-green leaves, lifted above its fellows of the woodland, like Saul’s head above the people, catch and hold the eye at once. And the great column of its trunk impresses you like the pillar of an Egyptian temple, not by classic grace, but by a rotund bulk, sheer size and weight speaking of massive antiquity. It is not their height that makes even the greatest of the kauri tribe remarkable, for one hundred and fifty feet is nothing extraordinary. But their picked giants measure sixty-six feet in circumference, with a diameter that, at least in one case, has reached twenty-four. Moreover, the smooth grey trunks rise eighty or even a hundred feet without the interruption of a single branch. And when you come to the branches, they are as large as trees: some have been measured and found to be four feet through. Then, though the foliage is none too dense, each leaf is of a fair size. From their lofty roof above your head to the subsoil below your feet, all is odorous of resin. Leaves and twigs smell of it; it forms lumps in the forks, oozes from the trunk and mixes with the earth--the swelling humus composed of flakes of decayed bark dropped through the slow centuries. There are still kauri pines in plenty that must have been vigorous saplings when William the Norman was afforesting south-western Hampshire. The giants just spoken of are survivors from ages far more remote.