48

Civil Secretary’s Office,
Auckland, 29th April, 1850.

TENDERS will be received at this Office,
until noon of Tuesday, 14th May, 1850,
from parties desirous of Contracting to supply
a Dinner for 500 Natives on Her Majesty’s
Birth Day, the 24th proximo.

Each Native to be supplied with the fol-
lowing Ration: —
1 ½-lbs. of Beef
1-lb. of Pudding
1 ½-lbs. of Bread
2-lbs. of Potatoes

And the Contractor to furnish for the use of
the Natives—

Table Covers
Knives and Forks
Plates
Mugs

Tenders to specify the rate at per ration, and
to be sent in Duplicate, sealed, and endorsed
“ Tenders for Dinner to Natives.”

Any further information on the subject may
be obtained at this Office.

C. A. DILLON,
Civil Secretary.

Colonial Secretary’s Office,
Auckland, April 26, 1850.

HIS Excellency the Governor-in-Chief
reets the publication of the following
extracts from the Annual Report of the Colo-
nial Surgeon of New Plymouth, for general in-
formation.

By his Excellency’s command,
ANDREW SINCLAIR,
Colonial Secretary.

Colonial Hospital, New Plymouth,
December, 1849.

Sir,—As this paper forms the first An-
nual Report of the New Plymouth Hospital,
it may be considered requisite to preface its
more immediate subjects with a few succinct
topographical notices of the district.

The climate of Taranaki, the district in
which the settlement of New Plymouth is situ-
ated, is benign and temperate, whether with
reference to summer heat or winter cold; and
together with the rarity of sudden vicissitudes
of either of these alternations, perhaps it is no
undue assumption to assert that it has a fair
claim to the appellation of the Montpellier of
these Islands. The annual extremes of tem-
perature are less remote than in most, if not all
of the various extra-tropical climates I have
visited.

Thunder storms are only occasional, or, in
comparison with many other countries, rare,
and are not known, I believe, ever to have done
any injury. As allied to these, I may notice
that slight shocks of earthquakes have been
repeatedly felt, though at long intervals. But,
at the time of the long-continued and some-
what disastrous concussions at Wellington and
its vicinity of last, and this year, one of more
than ordinary vibration was experienced here;

yet it was not in sufficient force to cause the
slightest accident or injury to any building.

The south-west and westerly winds are the
most prevalent here; the south and south-east
more or less charged with hydrate of iron, a
most cold and disagreeable, and the north-
erlies the most humid and luviatile.

The face of the country need not be much
descanted on in this report, as its beauty has
become almost proverbial; and has met with
the uniform and deserved admiration of all
travellers and authors who have hitherto visited
it.

The soil is a fine, easily subdued loam,
abounding, in its virgin state, in decayed vege-
table matter, and having for its substratum an
excellently proportioned composition of clay
and sand, neither over consistent nor excessive-
ly friable. But in some places this last is
more or less charged with hydrate of iron, a
poisonous integrant to vegetation, but readily
rendered innocuous by a summer fallow, or
even a shorter exposure than that to the
chemically converting influence of the atmos-
phere. The only drawback of the soil is the
absence of lime; at least in the many analyses,
not very nice indeed, which I have made of
different soils from various quarters of the set-
tlement, I have not succeeded in detecting the
least appreciable trace of this mineral.

But no rocks or sands of this formation have
been as yet discovered nearer to us than Mokau,
some forty miles to the northward, where,
however, it abounds, and whence, no doubt,
we shall be enabled to procure ample supplies
for all purposes.

Swamps and marshes, though they do not
so abound as in the vicinity of Petre, yet they
are every here and there throughout the dis-
trict; and the soil they occupy, as already in-
timated, is sufficiently clayey and retentive of
moisture to subject people to the usual morbid
influences of such like localities, if, in fact,
malaria so exists as to emanate therefrom.
Nor is the site of the town free from those stag-
nations; yet, and just as was experienced at
Wanganui, the occurrence of indigenous inter-
mittents and remittents is so rare, that during
a now nine years’ residence in this place and
that, I have never met with one case of fever,
which, from concurrent circumstances, I could
impute to the poison of what is strictly under-
stood by the term marsh miasma or effluvium.

It may be inferred, therefore, that either a
something is happily wanting in the constitu-
tion of the soil of our swamps for the genera-
tion of that malaria which acts as the remote
cause of these diseases; or, that the frequency
of our showers, and the moderation of our tem-
perature, never allow the drying process to
proceed far enough for the peculiar fermenta-
tion and exhalation. The absence of lime, too,
in our soil, may probably be taken into ac-
count, and the same defect exists at Petre, as
together with the last, forming conjointly, if I
may so say, the negative cause of our exemp-
tion from the paludal fever family.

But we shall see, as we proceed, that al-
though we have no marsh-generated fever to