GUM-TREES IN TASMANIA. 139 



"Some of the specimens exceed two hundred feet, 

 rising almost to the height of the monument in London 

 before branching ; their trunks also will bear comparison 

 with that stately column, both for circumference and 

 straightness. One of them was found to measure fifty- 

 five feet and a half round its trunk at five feet from the 

 ground ; its height was computed at two hundred and 

 fifty feet, and its circumference was seventy feet at the 

 base ! My companions spoke to one another, and called 

 to me when on the opposite side of the tree, and their 

 voices sounded so distant that I concluded they had in- 

 advertently quitted me in search of some other object. 

 I accordingly called to them, and they in answer remarked 

 the distant sound of my voice, and inquired if I possibly 

 were behind the tree. At the time when the road was 

 forming through the forest, a man, who had only two 

 hundred yards to go from one company of people to 

 another, lost his way ; he shouted, and was repeatedly 

 answered ; but, getting farther astray among the prodigious 

 trunks, his voice became inaudible, and he perished. A 

 prostrate tree of this kind was measured two hundred and 

 thirteen feet long ; we ascended the trunk on an inclined 

 plane, formed by one of its huge limbs, and walked four 

 of us abreast with ease upon the trunk. In its fall it had 

 hurled down another, one hundred and sixty-eight feet 

 long, which had brought up with its roots a wall of earth 

 twenty feet across ! " 



But examples of even superior size have been described 

 by the liev. T. Ewing of Hobart Town. The species is 



