SOME CAUSES OF THE DECAY OF AUSTRALIAN FORESTS. 93 
surprised at so frequently finding groups of dead trees in oe 
and verdant forests, and surrounded by luxuriant vegetatio 
If Blandowski regarded the aboriginal custom which he 
as sufficient to account for the groups of decaying trees to be met 
with foie time to time in the Australian forests, he must have 
greatly over-estimated the numbers of the aboriginals. About 
forty years ago a census was taken of the primitive sable occu- 
pants of the “County of Grant, in Victoria, and the Government 
return is set down at 200. By the year 1874 that number had 
rie down to a very small remnant. Now, supposing that 
when the numbers were largest, every man, woman, and child had 
been ‘seilsaaa with a sacred tree, there would have been just 200 
f such trees. But between 1862 and 1874 the writer saw 
thousands of trees dying and dead in the Meredith district. 
Quite age the cause is “not sufficient to account for the results 
observ ut even in regard to the locality to which Blandowski 
refers, ‘his own account leaves one insuperable difficulty in the 
way of the explanation suggested by him. For when that power- 
ful Goulburn tribe were overwhelmed and massacred, it is plain 
that the secret knowledge so closely associated with the destiny of 
the different members of the tribe must of necessity have perished. 
Then the question ping a tle erformed the office of barking 
anied the 
lit up the Ricihides of the forest till at last they ceased for ever. 
As years roll on some strange fatality seems to overtake the forest 
itself. Some blight smites it in the leaves, the trees dwindle into 
mere spectres, and at last die. What mysterious links in the chain 
of cause and effect have thus associated the disappearance of the 
more extensive destruction of the gum-trees. And what dis- 
turbed that equipoise of forces which, for unrecorded ages, 
reached a certain normal adjustment between all the forces and 
factors concerned in the case?’ The new disturbing factor was the 
white man, the resistless white man, before whom disappear all 
obstacles that come in his way, whether black men, opossums, or — 
eucalypt forests. 
