wind found the little flame, and before it was extinguished it had consumed four hundred acres of yellow but valuable pasture. And then there is the great area deliberately cut and burned to make way for grass. Here the defender of tree-life is faced with a more difficult problem. The men who are doing the melancholy work of destruction are doing also the work of colonisation. As a class they are, perhaps, the most interesting and deserving in colonial life. They are acting lawfully and in good faith. Yet the result is a hewing down and sweeping away of beauty, compared with which the conquests of the Goths and Vandals were conservative processes. For those noted invaders did not level Rome or Carthage to the ground: they left classic architecture standing. To the lover of beautiful Nature the work of our race in New Zealand seems more akin to that of the Seljuk Turks in Asia Minor, when they swept away population, buildings and agriculture, and Byzantine city and rural life together, in order to turn whole provinces into pasture for their sheep. Not that my countrymen are more blind to beauty than other colonists from Europe. It is mere accident which has laid upon them the burden of having ruined more natural beauty in the last half-century than have other pioneers. The result is none the less saddening. When the first white settlers landed, the islands were supposed still to contain some thirty million acres of forest. The Maori had done a share of destruction by reckless or accidental burning. Other causes, perhaps, had helped to devastate such tracts as the Canterbury plains and the kauri gum-fields. But enough, and more than enough, was left; indeed the bush seemed the chief barrier to rapid settlement. The havoc wrought by careless savages was a trifle compared with the wholesale destruction brought about by our utilising of the forests and the soil. _Quod non fecerunt Barbari fecere Barberini._ To-day we are told that the timber still standing cannot last our saw-mills more than two generations, and that a supply which was estimated at forty-three thousand million feet in 1905 had shrunk to thirty-six thousand million feet in 1907. The acreage of our forests must be nearer fifteen than twenty millions now. Some of this, covering, as it does, good alluvial soil, must go; but I am far from being alone in believing that four-fifths of it should be conserved, and that where timber is cut the same precautions should be insisted on as in Germany, France, India, and some intelligent portions of North America. Within the last two years great floods in Auckland and Hawke’s Bay, and, farther south, two summers hot and dry beyond precedent, seem to point the moral and strengthen the case for making a courageous stand on behalf of the moiety we have left of the woods that our fathers thought illimitable. [Illustration: MOUNT EGMONT]