16 ON THE DECADENCE OF AUSTRALIAN FORESTS; 
coast country of Central Queensland, that I was able to 
fully appreciate the healthier growth and the heavier foliage 
which exposed the ordinary forest eucalypts on New Eng- 
land to so much damage from heavy falls of snow. There 
was no necessity there to dodge the sun by shifting con- 
tinually so as to intercept his rays with the bole of the tree 
under which one rested; the leafy branches cast a thick 
shadow which make such tactics unnecessary. This struck 
me particularly in 1865, and I mention the circumstance 
because even then a change for the worse had commenced. 
During five years’ residence in the neighbourhood—from 
September, 1852, to September, 1857—I had frequently to 
cross a patch of country upon which there were a number 
of dead trees, the only survivors being low bushes of from 
three to five or six feet in height: this was on the Euro- 
pambela run, and I was more than once assured by old 
hands in that part of the country that they had been blasted 
by lightning. It is perhaps unnecessary to say that amongst 
some hundreds of trees I never saw a mark of lightning on 
any of them. The next place where there was a noticeable 
instance of the kind was on the Bergen-op-Zoom run, near 
the township of Walcha. Here on several hundred acres 
the whole of the peppermint trees, as they are locally desig- 
nated (Eucalyptus dealbata), died away completely. The 
exact year when this took place I do not know, but it was 
not long after 1857. These trees occupy the flats between 
the ridges, and they intermix with the white gums 
(Eucalyptus sp.*) along the borders of the flats; but while 
the whole of the peppermints died, the white gums were 
only slightly, if at all, affected. There is now an under- 
growth similar to the trees which died out. A few years 
later a large patch of trees on the western slope of a low 
range on the Tia run died ina similar manner. I have 
* Without access, at the present time, to botanical specimens of this 
particular white gum, it were perhaps hazardous to particularise the species 
of Eucalyptus to which reference is made; and especially so since, as the 
Colonial Botanist, Mr. F. M. Bailey, F.L.S., informs me, many different 
eucalypts, all growing in New South Wales, have this designation in com- 
mon, and Dr. Wools, the authority on the botany of the New England 
district, assigns the title of white gum to three different species, viz., 
E. stellulata, E. pauciflora, and E. amygdalina var radiata, all of which 
grow in this locality. 
