farmers turn their attention to something that will pay better. And so it is I advocate the establishment of experimental farms, and a department of agriculture as an imperative necessity, to say nothing of the beneficence of such a policy. There are drugs, dyes, fibres, fruits, oil-seeds, vegetables, timbers, barks, piths, nuts, roots, even mosses, weeds and fungi, with multitudes of valuable fodder plants, which are eminently suitable to our soil, adapted to our climate, and congenial in every way to all our conditions. It is in introducing these, in making these known that our experimental farms would be so beneficial. In no other way that I can see would so much national good be done at so little cost. Methinks that in this direction even the most bigoted protectionist, and the most utilitarian free-trader might work hand in hand.
Another feature of New Zealand rural life which struck me was the frequency of villages—the nearness of neighbours—in a word, settlement in communities, as contrasted with the isolated, detached way in which habitations are found set down at wide, weary intervals, in most of the country districts of New South Wales. Indeed, village life, such as we know it in the old country, or as it is found in many parts of New Zealand, is scarcely known in our older colony. The evils of indiscriminate, unrestricted selection—the Ishmaelitish, nomadic proclivities of the roving land-grabber of the old régime are, alas! "twice-told tales" in New South Wales;
