18 EUCALYPTUS TREES. 
the third volume of the “Flora Australiensis” by Mr. Bentham 
and the writer. A more popular and abridged definition of the 
Victorian species will be given in the second part of the School- 
Flora. 
In the natural system of plants, which arranges them according 
to their greatest total affinity in all respects, the genus Eucalyptus 
finds its place in the Order of Myrtaceee, of which the only 
European representative, the myrtle of the poets (Linné’s Myrtus 
communis) became the type. Australia possesses the myrtaceous- 
plants in vast abundance, not less than 650 species of the order 
being now known from our continent, and some will likely yet be 
added by future discoveries. 
Although all agree in the leading particulars, on which the 
characteristics of the Myrtacez rest, yet the general features of 
these numerous plants are much diversified. So we have among 
them shrubs of heath-like appearance, passing as Heath-Myrtles, 
including among Victorian plants a few species of the genera 
Calycothrix, Darwinia, Thryptomene and Beckea ; further the 
native tea-trees, inappropriately so called, as these bushes and 
trees never yield substitutes for tea, although a New Zealand 
species was used in Capt. Cook’s early expedition, to prepare a 
medicinal infusion against scurvy ; these so-called tea-trees com- 
prise within our colony species of Leptospermum, Kunzea, Mela- 
leuca and Callistemon, the last mentioned genus producing flowers 
with long stamens, on which the appellation “Bottle brushes” 
has been bestowed. Those Myrtaceee, which have berried fruits, 
abound in most intratropic regions ; we possess an only Victorian 
representative of this group in a noble tree of Hast Gippsland, 
the Eugenia Smithii, named by Mons. Poiret in honor of Sir James 
Smith, the founder of the Linnean Society. Although Middle 
and Northern Europe is destitute of Myrtaceze, this is not so from 
mere climatic circumstances, because to the glacier-regions of the 
Australian Alps a few plants of this order are peculiar, growing 
at the verge of permanent ice, here at elevations from 6,000 to 
7,000 feet over the level of the sea. On the Andes and some 
other lofty ranges occur also in their cold zone several myrtaceous 
plants. 
