164 Transactions.—Miscellaneous. 
little sap, but subject to heart decay. The colour is somewhat like miro 
without the irregular blotches. 
This timber has not to my knowledge been used in Otago. It is suited 
to any and all of the purposes to which the other pines are applied. Accord- 
ing to Mr. Kirk its durability is undoubted. He gives it as high, if not a 
higher place than totara. 
Dirches. 
The next most important class of softwoods is the birches, or more 
correctly beeches, They are, botanically, true beeches, consequently would 
be classed with the hardwoods in England, but as the majority of the New 
Zealand trees yield very soft timber, I have kept them with the softwoods. 
The birches are the most plentiful of the Otago timber trees, and at the 
same time the least known, consequently they require careful consideration 
at our hands. They belong to the genus Fagus, which has one representa- 
tive in Great Britain, the common beech, and a few more in other temperate 
countries. This genus in turn belongs to the same botanical order as chest- 
nut, oak, hazel, and hornbeam. 
As already stated the birches occupy almost exclusively the forests 
of the interior, and are abundant on the west coast, but rare on the east. 
There are no large trees in the vicinity of Dunedin, but they occur with 
more or less frequency in all the seaboard forests south of the Taieri. 
As will be seen by the tables, the utmost confusion prevails among the 
common names of the birches. ‘There are scarcely two districts, a few 
miles apart, in which the same name is applied to the same tree, and a 
similar result may be obtained by consulting two bushmen in the same 
bush. With the view of obviating this difficulty Mr. Kirk suggests ** the 
adoption of new names based on the obvious” characteristics of their foliage. 
For Fagus fusca, tooth-leaved beech ; for Fagus solandri, entire-leaved beech ; 
and for Fagus menziesii, round-leaved beech.” On first sight I thought this 
a capital arrangement, and did my best to establish it, but a fuller acquaint- 
ance with the trees convinced me that it was unsuitable. The difference 
between the leaves in many localities is too small to be noticeable by anyone 
but a scientific expert, and under any circumstance the peculiarity that is 
relied on for identification is not always the leading feature in the leaf. 
For instance, the teeth in some of the leaves of F. fusca, from Lake Waka- 
tipu, are so small that they are only seen on close inspection. Indeed they 
might easily be confounded with the leaves of F. solandri, from the Five 
Rivers Plain, which are nearly as large. The latter are entire, but have a 
curious horizontal corrugation in the margin that gives them the appearance 
of being toothed. The leaves of F. menziesii, although round, are not 
always so conspicuously round as some leaves of F. solandri, and the nicks 
