ii8 GLIMPSES INTO PLANT-LIFE 



While eucalyptus trees are young, and partially 

 shaded by surrounding vegetation, their leaves are 

 flat and oval, and English seedlings of this tree 

 usually retain such leaves from five to ten years, 

 our climate not being hot enough to require the 

 mature form of leaf which hangs vertically, and is 

 of an entirely different form. 



Reference to the plates will show a young shoot 

 of Eucalyptus globulus and a branch of the older 

 leaves, with their edges only exposed to sunlight. 



The curved sickle-shaped leaves of the eucalyp- 

 tus afford very little shade to the traveller in 

 Australia for this reason, that only fine inter- 

 crossing lines of shadow are seen on the ground. 

 To make this clear, let my readers take a sheet 

 of notepaper out of doors on a sunny day and 

 hold it perfectly flat, so as to expose it to all the 

 sunlight it can receive upon its surface, as if it 

 were a growing beech-leaf, and it will throw a 

 large shadow on the ground. Then hold it edge- 

 ways to the sun, and it will form the kind of thin 

 line of shadow that would be cast by a mature 

 eucalyptus leaf. 



Preparation for the fall of the leaf begins in 



