no doubt, in good time. The
business of the pioneer generations has been to turn a bloodstained or
silent wilderness into a busy and interesting, a happy, if not yet a
splendid, state.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books about New Zealand are numerous enough. A critic need not be
fastidious to regret that most of them are not better written, useful
and interesting as they are in the mass. Every sort of information
about the country is to be got from them, but not always with pleasure
or ease. To get it you must do a good deal of the curst hard reading
which comes from easy writing. And even then, for the most part, it is
left to your own imaginative power to see--

"The beauty, and the wonder, and the power,
The shapes of things, their colours, lights, and shades,
Changes, surprises."

The undoubted and agreeable exceptions, too, require in you some
knowledge of the Islands, if they are to be enjoyed. How is that
knowledge to be obtained? A hard-headed student with a hearty appetite
for facts might, of course, start with F.J. Moss's careful and
accurate school history and the latest Government Year Book in his
hand, and would soon be well on his way. Those who like easier paths
to knowledge may try Edward Wakefield's "New Zealand After Fifty
Years," or Gisborne's "Colony of New Zealand." When one comes to
periods, districts, or special subjects, the choice is much wider.

To begin at the beginning; "Tasman's Log" is little but dry bones; of
Cook and Crozet I have written elsewhere. Of the writers who tell of
Alsatian days, none is worth naming in the same breath with Maning.
Personally I like Polack and Savage the best of them, despite the
lumbering pretentiousness and doubtful veracity of the former. Earle
and Major Cruise are more truthful than readable--conditions which
are exactly reversed in the case of Rutherford. If, as is said, Lord
Brougham helped to write Rutherford's narrative, he did his work
very well; but after the exposure of its "facts" by Archdeacon W.L.
Williams, it can only be read as the yarn of a runaway sailor, who had
reasons for not telling the whole truth, and a capacity and knowledge
of local colour which would have made him a capital romance-writer,
had he been an educated man. As a picture of the times, Rutherford's
story in the "Library of Entertaining Knowledge" will always, however,
be worth reading.

The missionaries have not been as fortunate in their chroniclers as
they deserve.