;■ 



EUCALYPTUS EOSTRATA. 



curving. Next to the Jarrah from West Australia it is the best to resist the attacks of the Teredo 

 and Chelura and Termites. It takes a good polish and may thus be used for furniture, though it 

 is rather heavy and difficult to work on account of its great hardness. The specific gravity of Red 

 Gum-wood ranges from 0-858 to 1-005, or from 53^ to 62^ lbs. per cubic foot. Mr. F. Campbell 

 found the tensile strength to be equal to a pressure of 14,000 to 21,500 lbs. per square inch. 

 A ton of dry wood has yielded as much as 4 lbs. of pearlash or 2^ lbs. of pure potash. For 

 further details see the reports of the jurors of the successive great Melbourne Exhibitions, from 

 which part of the above notes was obtained. 



Dr. H. Nordlinger of Hohenheim has given in the sixth part of his " Querschnitte von 

 Holzarten" (1874, p. 19) a short anatomic description of the wood of E. rostrata. 



Dr. Josef Moeller of Marienburg has subjected this wood to a fuller anatomic examination. 

 We all find the medullary rays flexuous, very numerous and fine, formed by one, two or three 

 rows of cells, which are thin-walled, considerably longer than broad, and where they approach the 

 vascular tubes dotted by pores ; the concentric rings are indicated by the alternating greater and 

 lesser number of the vascular tubes or their absence ; the latter isolated, on transverse sections 

 their walls are circular or elliptical, with an average diameter of 0-15 millimeter ; they are also 

 copiously dotted, comparatively not thick, and contain often thin-walled cells with red-brown 

 particles, which are soluble in a solution of caustic potash ; these are contained also in the other 

 elements of the wood ; the parenchyma-cells are rather scantily dispersed but increased in number 

 around the vascular tubes, without however completely surrounding them, not much thicker than 

 the wood-fibres, but somewhat porous and with ampler cavity ; wood-fibres of an average width of 

 0-015 millimeter, thick-walled and dotted, mostly attenuated into a fine extremity, often curved 

 and occasionally ramified, some forming a solitary line between any double row of medullary rays. 



The fresh bark contains from 7 to 8 per cent. Kino, which for therapeutic purposes is regarded 

 as one of the most efficient of its kind. The air-dried wood of E. rostrata contained according to 

 one experiment 4-38 per cent, of Kino-tannin and 16-62 per cent, of Kino-red ; the latter (allied 

 to Phlobaphen) is soluble in alcohol but not in water ; the large percentage of these two 

 substances in our Eed Gum-wood is only rivalled, as far as known, by that of the hardest kind of 

 Jarrah-wood (from E. marginata), and we have thus a clue to the extraordinary power of these 

 two kinds of wood to resist decay in water and under ground and to be impervious to boring 

 insects or Crustacea. The fresh leaves, chemically analysed for their organic constituents by Mr. 

 L. Rummel under my direction, contain : Eucalypto-gallic acid -88, eucalypto-tannic acid 4-68, 

 eucalyptoic acid -16, gum 2-50, eucalyptin -72, fruitsugar 10-42. The mode of operation for the 

 chemical analysis of eucalyptus leaves, adopted on this occasion, was the following : The fresh 

 leaves were exhausted with boiling water, the clear liquid evaporated to honey-consistence, and 

 this extract mixed with about three times its volume of alcohol. The sediment thus obtained, 

 consisting mainly of gum-like substance, was separated from the liquid, and the latter evaporated 

 for driving off the alcohol. Renewed treatment of the remaining extract with cold water removed 

 indiiferent chiefly resinous substances. The clear liquid was precipitated with subacetate of lead 

 (applied slightly in excess) and the precipitate A separated from the liquid B by filtration. 



A. The precipitate was treated with diluted acetic acid and the insoluble portion (a) removed 

 from the remaining solution (b) by means of filtering. 



(a). The lead-compound, insoluble in acetic acid, was mixed with alcohol and decomposed 

 by sulphuret of hydrogen. The filtered solution yielded after evaporation 1, Eucalypto- 



