appearance of being fertile, although the unevenness of its surface would allow of only a small proportion being tilled, but all of it, excepting the bush land, which is not in large proportion, will afford good pasture. That the great plain which stretches from the Peninsula southward will be valuable, fertile and productive, there can be little doubt. How it might answer for pure agriculture immediately is perhaps doubtful, but in its present state it affords an immense field for grazing stock and the production at all events of one export, viz., wool, and that when enriched by the animals which consumed its grasses, returning them in the shape of manure and stimulating the soil, it would yield abundant crops, may be said ta be equally certain. The great drawback to the plain is the want of good wood upon it, and according to the scheme of the New Edinburgh Settlement, this becomes an almost fatal objection. A large capitalist and land-holder might obtain wood from the valleys of the Peninsula, and by operations on large scale compensate for the expense thus incurred, but the small capitalist upon his ten-acre or fifty-acre section would find his time and his means both frittered away in procuring so absolute a necessity, which, whether brought to him by land or water, could not fail to be an article of considerable expense. The climate of the plain behind the Peninsula, from what we heard of it, is steady, and on the whole fine, but large low and level plains are always subject to greater extremes of temperature than country of an uneven surface. I apprehend that the defects of climate of which we complain on the Waimea will be found in an exaggerated degree on Port Cooper.”
For some years the energy of the New Zealand Company was directed to the establishment of the New Edinburgh or Scottish Settlement, and it was not till the year 1847 that the proposal to form the Church of England Settlement began to take concrete form. It may be left to the next chapter to tell how this came about.
