50 Hardy, Tall Trees of Austyalia. [voi"^''xxxV 



grow on short stalks radiating from a common peduncle, and 

 form an umbel in the leaf axil. Because the timber resembles 

 European Ash the tree was called Mountain Ash, and, later, 

 White Mountain Ash, in contradistinction to Red Mountain Ash 

 or Victorian Woolly Butt, E. delegatensis, the wood of which 

 has a pinkish-brown tinge. It is the chief lumber-tree of Vic- 

 toria, and luxuriates in the eastern and Otway forests. The 

 fissile, porous wood is used largely for house construction, 

 furniture, and fittings, and for a variety of other purposes, while 

 chemical products such as acetic acid, acetone, formalin, and 

 creosote, charcoal, &c., are obtained by retorting timber of no 

 use to the sawmiller. Defective trees are not milled, but split 

 up into palings, over 10,000 broad palings 6 feet in length 

 having been obtained from one giant. Such, in short, is the 

 tree which we offer as a not unworth\' competitor with the 

 Sequoias. 



In his " Forest Flora of New South Wales," J. H. Maiden, 

 I.S.O., F.R.S., gives space to the question of giant cucalypts, 

 and is as modest in his claim for the eucalypt as his con- 

 temporary, Sargent, in America, is in recording the Sequoia. 

 Maiden is sceptical concerning stories of trees of 400 feet existing 

 in Australia to-day, though he does not go so far as to suggest 

 that such giants never existed. 



Measured Heights. 



The following are three measurements which exceed those 

 in the atlas of giant trees referred to above : — 



(i) In the fifth progress report of the Royal Commission on 

 State Forests and Timber Reserves, in 1889, it is stated that 

 the Engineer of the Shire of Colac had measured a Mountain 

 Ash, E. regnans, in the parish of Olangolah, which was 64 feet 

 6 inches in girth at a height of 8 feet, and that the same 

 surveyor measured a prostrate Mountain Ash in the same 

 parish, the latter being 329 feet to a point at which the top 

 was broken off by the fall ; the diameter 4 feet at 16 feet from 

 the base end ; and the girth 3 feet 6 inches at a height of 

 255 feet, and 2 feet 5 inches at 328 feet. 



(2) Mr. G. W. Robinson, civil engineer and surveyor, was 

 engaged in the Dandenong forest over 60 years ago. Even 

 then, he says, the tallest and straightest trees had been taken 

 out by the shingle-splitter. The present writer's father (the 

 late John Hardy, Government Surveyor) said a few years ago 

 that he never measured a 400-foot tree, and, though trees of 

 300 feet were common enough, and up to 350 feet not in- 

 frequent, the bigger trees had already been felled and removed 

 by the paling-splitter. Mr. Robinson, however, records as his 

 best big tree measured one which was " 342 feet to the com- 



