THE KOMANCE OF NATURAL HISTORY. 



eluded they had inadvertently 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 be- 

 came 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 1" 



But examples of even superior size have been 

 described by the Rev. T. Ewing of Hobart Town. 

 The species is probably the same, though called by 

 another provincial name. 



"Last week I went to see two of the largest 

 trees in the world, if not the largest, that have 

 ever been measured. They were both on a tribu- 

 tary rill to the North-west Bay River, at the back 

 of Mount Wellington, and are what are here called 

 Swamp Gums. One was growing, the other pros- 

 trate; the latter measured, to the first branch, 

 two hundred and twenty feet; from thence to 

 where the top was broken off and decayed, sixty- 

 four feet, or two hundred and eighty-four feet in 

 all, so that with the top it must have been con- 

 siderably beyond three hundred feet. It is thirty 

 feet in diameter at the base, and twelve at the 

 first branch. We estimated it to weigh, with the 

 136 



