NEW ZEALAND COURT AT

Patea Mail, 2 December 1880, Page 4

NEW ZEALAND COURT AT

MELBOURNE.

A correspondent at the Exhibition says: —The visitor to the New Zealand Court cannot fail to bo struck with the evidence around of almost complete independence of external aid, for all that makes life endurable, which this remote colony presents. Wc allowed our im agination to picture to ourselves the old country submerged in the Atlantic, the European continent also, and as much of the rest of the world as is necessary to illustrate our views. Then, New Zealand could, notwithstanding such a dire catastrophe, get along very well without those venerable institutions. Looking around the exhibits, it is pretty clear that one might obtain almost any thing, from a carriage to a canoe, from a pocket of hops to a bottle of soda-water, from a ricbly-carved sideboard to a revolving bee-hivo, or a new hat or a fashionable bonnet made from the laccbark of a New Zealand tree. The display of pinned wood from the principal forest trees is very remarkable —the kauri especially. One fine specimen measures 7ft Gin in breadth of plank, and the mottled varieties must be susceptible of conversion into beautiful art-furniture. Huge contorted masses of lava-like looking substance proved to bo “ gum ” found, wo are told, below the surface of the ground, the excretion of former trees which has run down and coagulated in-to-these strange forms. We wonder whether the expletive “ by gum,” has any philological connection with this resinous substance ? And such ferns ! Were Mr Heath hero from England, he would dance a wild Highland fling at the bare sight of such beautiful varieties. The samples of grain arc very numerous, finer, larger, and the yield, wo are informed, is relatively very largo. But, perhaps, the coal seams arc the most surprising. Seams of two feet are considered large in Great Britain, but here wc have coal-seam, represented as 1G feet in measurement, and there is said to be one of no less than 40 feet, now being opened at Westpoint, on the West Coast of New Zealand. We learn that no less than 160,000 tons of New Zealand coal was consumed within the colony in 1878, and that those magnifi-

cent steam vessels, the Eotomahana, and the Wakatipv —of which two beautiful models are exhibited here—consume coal of home production. Few things astonish English visitors more than the sight of these magnificent ships, and the fact of their finding a sufficient field only in inter-colonial transits. Two or three skeletons of Moa give an air of antiquity to the Court, still further increased by the display of pre-historic weapons, though only intended to illustrate their parity of use by modern savages.