of Australia, but legislation has been passed, and exists to-day, to combat it.
To the owners of grazing-stations the rabbit is a marauding rodent; to trappers, freezing works, and skin exporters it is a treasure trove on feet. In a single night trappers catch from fifty to two hundred rabbits, daily freezing works handle thousands of them, and every year exporters ship between 7,000,000 and 8,000,000 rabbit skins. In the last twenty years more than 120,000,000 rabbit skins have been exported from New Zealand.
A feature of the route to the Cold Lakes is the pronounced evidence of glaciation. There are deep and wide channels that apparently are the beds of ancient ice streams, and dry basins that once probably were lakes. Many persons believe that Manapouri and Te Anau are but the remains of an immense inland sea. That these lakes have been much higher is certain; the regularly formed banks rising well above high water mark on their eastern shores clearly indicate it.
Of these two lakes Manapouri, the smaller, is the most beautiful sheet of fresh water in New Zealand. It lies between mountains from three thousand to five thousand feet high. Its clear blue waters mirror dense forests; its long arms are like fiords; and it is dotted with thirty-five wooded islands. Manapouri's surface is five hundred and ninety-seven feet above the sea, and its deepest part is eight hundred and sixty feet below mean tide. Its area is fifty-six square miles, its extreme length about twenty miles. It is connected with Te Anau,
