23LINK WITH ASIA

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 306, 20 August 1932, Page 2

23LINK WITH ASIA

TREES OF NEW ZEALAND INDICATE HISTORY OF LAND. "The composition of our forests depends on their past history," said Mr. . W. B. Oliver, Director of the Dominion Museum, in an address to th'e New Zealand Forestry League. "Some forest trees have been evolved on the I spot, but the flora as ' a whole must at some time have heen united directly to some portion of the outside v/orld. "What part of the world this country was united to should be read in the plants themselves, but unfortunately the interpretation of this story is not simple and different hotanists have arrived at different conclusions. In addition to the flora which owes its nature to a direct land connection, possibly some of the trees and other plants have been Tbrought here accidentally by the seeds being earried by ocean currents, hy the wind, 01* by birds." From a map of the Western Pacific, with the contour lines of the ocean bed marked, it was seen that there was a great ocean ridge extending from New Zealand to New Guinea and including New Caledonia, Fiji and the Solomon Islands. On either side there was much deeper water, and to the south it was very deep1. This would indicate that there was at one time a land connection to the northwest, and this agreed very well with the fact that the principal trees in New Zealand were related to those growing on this land ridge where it projected above the sea, and in Malaya where it joined the Asiatic continent. At the same time this did not eover all the facts, because it left them in the dark regarding certain plants which were related to those in South Ameriea. "The first land flora in New Zealand is known by fossil plants to have been eomposed of fernlike plants and cycads," said Mr. Oliver. "This fiora was much the same all over the world and disappeared when modern plants invaded th'e earth. There is a large group of hardwoods quite peeuliar to New Zealand. These have mainly a Malayan stamp. They form the baekbone, as it were, of our flora, aud might be considered as descendants of the forest that was in New Zealand at the time it was last joined to some other land in the north. They have a semi-tropical or tropical stamp and that explains why our forest trees eannot stand extremes of cold." Mr. Oliver illustrated his lecture with' many lantern slides of forests in other parts of the world, as well as those of New Zealand, and explained which trees were suitable for growth in_ New Zealand. New Zealand, he said, had a tropical forest adapted to the more or less temperate climate, and it was peeuliar in that it extended right down to the Antarctie islands.