place it in the fork of another tree, and hold 
the small end over a container. Beads of water 
form almost at once on the cut surface, and 
the water drips steadily for from five to fifteen 
minutes. As soon as it ceases to drip, cut the 
sapling in halves, reject the thick end, and the 
flow will start again. Continue until a piece 
about eighteen inches in length is left, and the 
last of the water is removed from it by blow- 
ing through it. 
When the scrub contains many different 
species of trees, and they are new to the ex- 
perimenter, much time can be saved by chop- 
ping a piece out of each. If heartwood is met 
in any species, or the annual rings are dis- 
tinct, the chance of that species yielding water 
is remote. If the sapling shows no rings and 
is sapwood right through, it will probably 
yield water. 
The average sapling yields up to half-a-pint 
of clear and practically tasteless water, but 
again it is possible to obtain double this quan- 
tity. The most surprising example of securing 
potable water by this method in apparently 
unpromising surroundings was demonstrated 
repeatedly in the mangrove swamps which 
fringe much of the northern coastline of Aus- 
tralia. No species of mangrove tested by the 
writer ever yielded water, and one, known as 
the '‘Milky mangrove”, exuded a thick, white 
sap which is a corrosive and virulent poison, 
but scattered through these swamps, on rises 
often no more than a foot above high-tide- 
mark, are thickets of a paper-bark teatree 
( Melaleuca spp.). On numerous occasions a 
hundred of these teatree saplings, cut down, 
turned upside down, and allowed to drain into 
pannikins, crowns of felt hats, etc., would 
yield sufficient water to slake the thirst of a 
class of fifteen Army or Air Force personnel 
who had been made very thirsty by travelling 
through the humidity of the swamps. 
The third method of obtaining water from 
native flora will work with but one species of 
tree in one locality: the baobab or “Bottle 
tree” ( Adamsonia gregorii, F.v.M.), of the 
northern portion of Western Australia. A 
young tree about nine inches in diameter is 
selected ; a vertical strip of bark is removed, 
and the soft, spongy sapwood is cut out in 
chunks of convenient size and chewed. Each 
piece of sapwood yields about a teaspoon of 
water with a pleasant, sweetish flavour, and is 
reduced by the process of chewing to a wad of 
fibres. 
The fourth method will also work with but 
one species of tree : the “Bottle tree I Sterculia 
rupestris ) , of Queensland. V-cuts are made in 
the bark, one above the other like the chevrons 
of a sergeant, connected by a vertical cut down 
the centre, and along this the water trickles, 
to be diverted by a piece of leaf used as a 
spout into a container. 
The writer, taught by his father when very 
young, and later helped by aboriginal play- 
mates, learned to obtain water when thirsty 
from the roots or trunks of trees. When in 
country where no surface waters existed, it 
became almost as automatic to do it as to turn 
a tap when in a city. In later years it became 
obvious that not one white man in a thousand 
— even those born and reared in the bush— 
knew anything worth mentioning of this sub- 
ject; at outback police stations the writer saw 
pathetic last messages, some scratched upon 
the blackened outside of billycans, written by 
men who had died of thirst. The full tragedy 
was revealed when a visit was paid to spots 
where the bodies of some of the victims had 
been found; only too often, for want of a little 
elementary knowledge, the man had died 
where an aborigine could have obtained suffi- 
cient water to keep him alive. 
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