In concluding this imperfect sketch, it would be unpardonable to omit a further and fuller reference to the fact, that this is the hundredth year since the arrival, in New Zealand, of Captain Cook. He landed for the first time in this country, in October, 1769, at Turanganui, which he afterwards named Poverty Bay,—apparently because the ferocity of the Natives of that district (of which we have lately had fresh and terrible experience), prevented him from obtaining water and other supplies for his crew. When, some months ago, I visited Turanganui, and stood on the spot where tradition reports that the illustrious navigator first set his foot on these shores, the thought struck me that it would have cheered his gallant spirit, amidst his many dangers and distresses, if his imagination (a faculty seldom wholly wanting in great men) could have portrayed the future destiny of the Terra Australis—of the vast Continent and Islands of the Southern Ocean—previously invested, like the fabled Atlantis of old, by the reports of the early Dutch and Spanish navigators —with a dim and mysterious interest, but which Cook first made practically known to his own countrymen, and, through them to the civilized world. It would, however, have required prophetic inspiration to foretell, that in the “Great Southern Land,” in which Cook first recommended the foundation of British settlements, there would arise, within less than a century after that recommendation, a British Empire, embracing a territory nearly as large as Europe, and already far surpassing in wealth, in trade, in all the arts which advance and adorn civilization, those American colonies, which, a hundred years ago, were on the eve of renouncing their allegiance to the mother country. It need scarcely be mentioned, among the many obvious proofs and illustrations of these statements, that, in 1769, the trade of all the Colonies which now form the American Republic and the Dominion of Canada, did not much exceed in value three millions sterling yearly; whereas the trade of New Zealand alone now reaches nearly ten millions sterling, while the annual trade of all the Australasian Colonies reckoned together amounts to sixty millions sterling. Again, the richest and most populous city in North America, a century back, was Boston, which, though then more than one hundred and fifty years old, contained only 20,000 inhabitants. Now, in 1869, Melbourne, the largest and wealthiest city in the southern hemisphere, though barely thirty-five years old, contains not far from 150,000 inhabitants. Many here present must be familiar with the celebrated passage in one of the most eloquent speeches of Edmund Burke, where the aged statesman, Lord Bathurst, is supposed to have foreseen, in his youth, with the aid of a heavenly guide, the rise of American colonization from insignificance to greatness during his own lifetime—that is, during the first seventy years of the eighteenth century. “Suppose,” said the brilliant orator, “that the angel of the auspicious youth, foreseeing the many virtues which made him one of the most amiable, as he is one of the most fortunate, men of his age, had