1885.] THE VALUE OF TIMBER. 353 



The results of two specimens of ti^rafting this summer on laburnum 

 and maple respectively, look at first sight to be of the type of the 

 " Gigantic Gooseberry " paragraph ; but we give them as evidenced by 

 personal observation, though the wherefore of the phenomena may not 

 yet have been worked out by the scientist. "When the golden variety 

 of the laburnum was budded on the common variety, the bud died ; 

 but all the shoots below the bud produced the golden variety. 

 In the same way, we saw plants about five feet high where the 

 sugar maple was grafted on the Norway maple, where the grafts 

 had all died, but the shoots produced underneath the grafts, in many 

 cases four feet down from them, turned out those of the broad- 

 leaved sugar maple. So, in both laburnum and maple, the leaves 

 of the graft replaced tliose of the original stock. 



THE VALUE OF TIMBER AFFECTED BY SITE OF 



GROWTH. 



IN the course of a lecture " On Timbers and their Uses," before 

 the Chamber of Manufactures at Adelaide, South Australia, 

 ]\Ir. Hack gave several telling instances of the importance of the 

 above theme. In that colony it was necessary to consider the 

 effects of the climate upon wood, and it could not be expected that 

 because certain timber stood well in England it would be equally 

 good at the antipodes. Great extremes of heat and cold were very 

 trying to wood, and in a warm climate insects such as white ants or 

 the marine teredo were much more destructive than in places further 

 distant from the tropics. Timbers that would withstand exposure 

 to the weather or the ravages of insects were especially valuable, 

 and of this class red gum and jarrah were the best known and most 

 used for general and outdoor purposes. If the trees and the locality 

 of their growth were properly selected, these timbers were practi- 

 cally imperishable. The red gum from the Mount Lofty ranges was, 

 as a rule, well-grown, straight and close-grained, and of a good 

 colour, though even here there were trees quite unfit for the sawmill. 

 That produced on the Murray Flats was very unreliable, and though 

 the Victorian forests contained large quantities of good timber, so 

 little care had been exercised in the selection of trees that it 

 had been prohibited from use in Government contracts in South 

 Australia. Western Australian jarrah, locally known as Swan liiver 

 mahogany, which was greatly relied upon in this colony, grew in the 

 south-western districts of "Western Australia, the vast granite and 

 ironstone ranges south of Perth being covered with forests of these 

 noble trees, thousands of them with trunks as straight as a mast for 



