inhabitants possessed when Europeans came in contact with them, all of which were ill adapted to the climatic conditions of the country. From these plants, the aute, taro, hue, and kumara, we gather that the inhabitants came from a much warmer zone, and that, between the time of their arrival in the country and its rediscovery by Cook in 1769, they were unable to obtain more suitable species. Besides the foreign plants enumerated, there were in cultivation when the missionaries commenced their labours in the country several varieties of the Phormium tenax, an endemic species, proving that it was not the lack of knowledge that limited agriculture. I will now examine separately each of the plants mentioned, and ascertain what evidence can be extracted from them. Aute, or Paper Mulberry (Broussonetia papyrifera).—When Captain Cook* “Captain Cook's Journal.” visited the Bay of Islands in 1769 he noticed in cultivation about half a dozen of the “cloth plants” with which he had become familiar while in Tahiti. The cloth made from the bark, he remarked, was very scarce, being worn only as an ornament in the ear, and rarely seen. Of the various articles offered to the natives in barter by the crew of the “Endeavour,” the tapa cloth brought from Polynesia, everywhere, excepting Queen Charlotte Sound, was most highly esteemed. Possibly the southern natives, who were not agriculturists at Cook's time, had lost this memento of their former home. Their indifference may, however, point in a different direction. The presence of the paper mulberry, or aute as it was generally styled throughout Polynesia as well as New Zealand, proved beyond doubt that the latter islands were regularly colonised—not accidentally peopled, the explanation until recently generally received. In Polynesia, where the shrub was extensively cultivated for the sake of its bark, it was invariably propagated by cuttings. A transportation of the plant thus raised across the broad expansive ocean that separates the nearest of the Polynesian groups from New Zealand bespeaks at once skill and forethought; the scarcity of the plant, and the fact of its dying out since the missionaries commenced their labours in New Zealand, shows that even after it was established in the country it could only be grown with the utmost care. The B. papyrifera belongs to the flora of Japan, and probably to that of China, where it still furnishes material for one of the many fabrics called “grass cloth.” How the species found its way into Polynesia, and from thence to New Zealand there is little hope of discovering, but its presence in