G.~ 5.

to this, individualized the holdings of the intended grantees on paper; though I have given them to understand that the actual survey of individualized sections on the ground will have to be done by themselves and at their own expense, the pledges of the Government having been more than fulfilled when the hapu grants shall have been issued. It will be seen, from what I have stated, that very considerable areas are now, and very much larger ones will shortly be, in a position to be operated upon by the Manager of Native Reserves under the leasing powers conferred by the Act of 1881. 4. I am sorry now to have to inform your Excellency that, as regards the remaining portion of my work, a very serious obstacle exists, from which I have already suffered to some extent, and which threatens most seriously to retard its completion. It is the condition of existing surveys in the Taranaki district, with which the surveys to be executed in the course of my operations are necessarily in contact. Your Excellency is probably aware that in New Zealand, as in most newly-occupied countries, the exigencies of settlement outstrip the resources of the period for the survey of the lands which are to be occupied. There is usually an insufficient supply of professional surveyors, of good instruments, and often of pecuniary means. But the work has to be done somehow, and with the aid of the prismatic compass and chains of various lengths, in the hands of too often incompetent persons, it is got through sufficiently to enable the land to be occupied, though in a rough-and-ready manner, which insures a large proportion of error, and often results in nearly all the work having to be corrected and done over again at a future day. What New Zealand has suffered in this way has been recorded in several very able reports : one by Major Palmer, R.E., who examined into the state of the surveys of this colony in 1874; one by Mr. Thomson, the SurveyorGeneral of the colony, who reported in 1877 ; and two others by Mr. Moorhouse, Registrar-General, in 1872 and 1871 (Appendix to Journals, House of Representatives, 1875, H.-l; 1877, H.-17a; and 1872, G.-5). The results have not been less disastrous in the New Plymouth district than in any other, while, owing to circumstances not necessary to be stated, the correction of the imperfect work has been effected to a very limited extent. The establishment of a better system all over the colony, and the necessity which has existed since the establishment of the Torrens Registry, under which the Colonial Government becomes pecuniarily liable for all errors in the registered maps of transferred estates, have for some time past induced the Survey Department of the colony to require a degree of accuracy in all transactions passing under its scrutiny which did not exist in the old surveys of the Taranaki district, and which can only be obtained by high professional skill, superior instruments, and by astronomical and trigonometrical processes. In the portion of my district south of Waiugongoro the surveys were in a condition to enable any work of mine based upon them to be accepted by the Surveyor-General, and to be at once put on Crown grants for execution by your Excellency. But in the part of the district north of that river, and all the way to the northern limit of the confiscated land, it is otherwise. Even the physical boundaries of the blocks on which I have to operate, the rivers and sea-beaches, have never been traversed; scarcely any trigonometrical work has been done; and, quite unexpectedly, all this has to be done by me before such maps of reserves as I may from time to time have to lay before your Excellency can be accepted by the Survey Department of the colony. lam at present in correspondence with the Hon. the Minister of Crown Lands on the subject, and endeavouring to discover some method by which the difficulty may be lessened (Appendix II.). As I have pointed out to him, it is only a question of time; there is no inherent impossibility in the thing itself; Ihe cost to the colony would be no greater, but rather less if the work were performed in one year instead of three, as it could be if your Excellency's Government is prepared to authorize a very considerable increase in my present survey staff. An additional evil arising from the delay is that it prevents rny carrying out the judicial functions of ascertaining the ownership and allocating the lands to this or that body of Natives —operations which in most instances cannot be effected till the surveys are so far advanced as to admit

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