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7. Future Diminution of Fires.
For a long time to come the fires will overrun the country more or less every dry season, but after a while they will gradually decrease, both in extent and destructiveness.
The area of bush land available for settlement is limited; and after the dead timber has been consumed, and the country reduced to cultivation, there will be nothing to carry the flames over a wide extent. We may therefore confidently hope that in a few years such terrible conflagrations as have lately overspread whole provinces will be things of the past, and that the fires that do occur will be comparatively small and local.
The same thing will happen, though much more slowly, on the large areas of open land now covered with fern or tea-tree. As the cattle and sheep find their way over the run the surface growth is consumed or trodden down to some extent, and grass springs up from the seed carried in their droppings. It
![Thumbnail: [Volume 31, 1898 page 478]](/journals/rsnz/images/rsnz_31/thumbnails/rsnz_31_00_0508_0478_ac_02.gif)
is true that the fern or tea-tree is not long in reasserting itself, but the animals continue their work, and sooner or later the grass must get the mastery; so that the native growth, if it does not disappear altogether, will be broken up into patches, when a fire of large extent will become impossible.
This comparative cessation of fires will have a marked effect on the country. By degrees the dead timber, which now forms such an unsightly fringe to the bush, will decay and disappear, and, instead of furnishing fuel for further destruction, will help to fertilise the ground. The trees which are able to bear the new conditions will take on fresh vigour, and the seedlings, whether within the forest or forming an independent growth, will have an opportunity of coming to maturity.