160 'Transactions.— Miscellaneous. 
age, consequently it is well adapted for flooring, weather-boards, and the 
other ordinary joiners’ work for which white deal is usually employed. 
Tradesmen will not allow a compazison to be made between the native and 
imported articles. "They say the latter is infinitely superior, and that white 
pine is too soft and spongy for anything like good work. I do not think 
there are sufficient grounds for such a conclusion, which is in all probability 
arrived at by comparing seasoned foreign timber, the only kind that can be 
got here, with green colonial timber, the only kind that is used. The white 
pine timber of Otago is in my opinion equal, if not superior, to Baltic white 
deal for all the purposes for which the latter is adapted, and its supposed 
inferiority is due entirely to defective seasoning. ; ; 
White pine is not durable in any situation where exposed to damp or 
frequent changes from wet to dry. It will not last two years in fencing 
posts or house blocks; even rails and beams of bridges that are clear of the 
ground decay in three or four years, the least moisture retained in a joint or 
mortice brings rapid destruction. The heart-wood is durable, but there is 
so little of it, and there is so much danger of using sap instead, that no 
advantage can be taken of its good qualities. I show a piece of white pine 
heart-wood taken from a large log that has been felled many years at Deborah 
Bay. It is still in good preservation. Some of the piles in the George- 
street jetty, Port Chalmers, are of white pine. They are eaten away to a 
third of their original diameter by the Limnoria, but the timber has not 
suffered much from natural decay. Although soft and weak, the fibre is 
still intact. Mr Kirk says that white pine in Wellington and other places 
in the North is subject to the attack of a minute double-winged insect, but 
so far as I can ascertain it has no such enemy in Dunedin. 
This timber is known in all the provinces except Otago by the native 
name of * kahikatea." I think we should adopt it also, not only on account 
of being more euphonious, but for the reason that so many timbers in other 
parts of the world are called white pine. 
Dacrydium. 
Otago possesses three members of this genus, which is a small one 
confined to the Southern Pacific; they consist of a large and a small 
timber tree, and a mountain shrub. According to Gordon, there are only 
two large timber trees of this family out of New Zealand ; one frequents 
the mountains of Sumatra, and the other is the famous Huon pine of 
Tasmania. 1 ; 
No. 6. Red Pine—Daerydium cupressimum. This is the most plentiful of 
the pines, and the most used timber tree in Otago ; itis found in all the low- 
lying forests round the coast from Waikouaiti to Martin Bay. It grows toa 
height of one hundred and fifty feet, with a clear straight trunk up to eighty 
