The process is inevitable, and in great part needful, frightfully wasteful as it seems.

But the forest reserves of the Colony, large as they are, should be made even more ample.

Twelve hundred thousand acres are not enough--as the New Zealanders will regretfully admit when a decade or so hence they begin to import timber instead of exporting it.

As for interfering with reserves already made, any legislator who suggests it should propose his motion with a noose round his neck, after the laudable custom followed in a certain classic republic.
New Zealand is by no means a flat country, though there are in it some fair-sized plains, one of which--that of Canterbury--is about as flat a stretch of one hundred miles as is to be found in the world.

On the whole, however, both North and South Islands are lands of the mountain and the flood, and not only in this, but in the contour of some of their peaks and coast-line, show more than a fanciful resemblance to the west of Scotland.