PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION D. 251 
water I have reason to believe that the red wood of Turpentine 
will resist the Z’eredo for many years (I can speak for twenty 
years at least), but when there is some fresh water mixed with 
the salt water, as up rivers, I find the worm will go through 
and destroy Turpentine piles wzthin a year in some cases.” 
It is pointed out that the life of a pile chiefly depends on 
whether the bark is intact or not, and these writers lay it down 
as an important rule “ That Turpentine piles be, as far as pos- 
sible, felled in the summer, as the bark then clings to the log, 
and it not so likely to start when felled. In the ‘winter, when 
the sap is down, the bark is readily separable.” 
The representative of this tree in Queensland is Syncarpia 
hill. Myr. Fred. Turner informs the writer that he found it 
growing at Frazer’s Island and at Tin Can Bay, near Mary- 
borough. The local blacks, who called it Peebeen, or Peabeen, 
construct their canoes of it, and informed him that the wood was 
proof against Cobra. The bark is said to contain a consider- 
able amount of tannic acid. The drawback to its utilisation is 
that the timber does not grow in good straight barrels, or in ac- 
cessible places. 
Mr. E. O. Moriarty, then Engineer for Harbours and Rivers 
for New South Wales, showed a Parliamentary Committee sec- 
tions of an Ironbark pile from Dunmore Bridge, on the Paterson 
River, about six miles above its Junction with the Hunter River, 
New South Wales, entirely destroyed by Cobra in the space of 
four years; also an Ironbark log, which had been completely 
riddled after ten years’ immersion at Circular Quay (a). 
Mr. E. M. de Burgh deposed before another Parliamentary 
Committee that the Ironbark walings of the Glebe Island Bridge 
were so destroyed by Cobra after thirty-seven years’ service that 
he could not dispose of the fragments for firewood. When he 
took them up they were hanging clear of the bolts, which had 
broken through them (0). 
Captain Ferguson, Chief Harbourmaster of Williamstown, 
Victoria, has given some particulars of the boring of submerged 
timbers in Victorian waters (c). 
An account of worm-eaten piles from the Franklin Wharf, 
Hobart, was published by Sir William Denison (d). 
Mr. C. W. Darley has shown the writer an example in spirits 
of a shipworm, apparently V. edaz, procured from the Richmond 
River, New South Wales, which, when fresh, extended for the 
enormous length of 5 ft. 10 in., and has assured him that such a 
length has been exceeded by others which he has measured. The 
ae Moriarty. Op. cit., 
(b) De Burgh. Report ‘of the Proposed Removal of Pyrmont and Glebe Island Bridges, 
1894, p. 6. 
(c) Report on Class III., Indigenous Vegetable Substances. Catalogue of the Victorian 
Exhibition of 1861, pp. 8-11. 
(d) Denison. Proc. Roy. Soc. V.“Diemen’s Land, 1852, pp. 74-77. 
