256 NOTES OF A NATURALIST. 



connected with the sea by a narrow sound that opens 

 on the western side of the Straits near Port Gallant. 

 The lower slopes of the intervening range are covered 

 with forest, and the summit apparently bare, but in 

 this season covered with snow. If the extreme diffi- 

 culty of penetrating the forests were not well known, 

 it would be a matter of surprise that no one has ever 

 crossed the range, and that the eastern shores of 

 Otway Water, not thirty miles distant from Punta 

 Arenas, are yet unexplored. 



In returning to Punta Arenas I passed through the 

 remains of the burnt forest that once extended close 

 to the houses. In the summer of 1 873, either by design 

 or accident, fire seized the forest, composed of large 

 trees of the antarctic beech, and raged so furiously for 

 a time as to threaten destruction to the entire place. 

 After the first efforts at averting the immediate danger, 

 no further interference was attempted, and I was 

 assured that the conflagration was not entirely ex- 

 hausted until the ensuing winter, nearly six months 

 after it commenced. I passed the charred remains of 

 hundreds of thick stumps, many of them over three 

 feet in diameter, but I was surprised to find several 

 trees much too large to have grown up since the fire, 

 which in some unexplained way escaped destruction. 

 Unlike most of the beeches of the southern hemisphere, 

 this has deciduous leaves, so that the branches were 

 bare ; but many of them w^ere laden with the curious 

 parasite, Myzodendron pimctidatum, the structure of 

 which plant and its allies was long ago admirably 

 illustrated by Sir Joseph Hooker.* 



* " Flora Antarctica," vol. ii. p. 289. 



