155 
Wood about Rome is scarce ; people are cold in winter 
and would gladly use a fire, and they put cloaks on even 
in their houses I am told. True, their winter is short. It 
is a very expensive thing to have a fire in a hotel, and one 
can easily burn five francs’ worth of wood in a day, or at the 
rate of seventy pounds’ worth a year for a fire in one small 
room. People have not fires enough for the wants of a full 
civilisation. Even large hotels allow their fires to go out in 
the evening, and cooking at unusual times cannot be accom- 
plished. The wood of a gum tree five years old is larger 
than necessary for firewood, and would at any rate be of a 
most convenient size for splitting up. It is too large near 
the ground to be used entire, and much larger than any of 
the wood which I got in Rome or Florence. 
Let us imagine this as a source of fuel, a portion of the 
Campagna, Maremma, Pontine marshes, &c., growing such a 
crop of combustible matter every five years. Where else 
will be found a coal field equal in value ? Let the power 
obtainable from this be calculated. 
Professor Boyd Dawkins tells me that Sir Charles Nichol- 
son, late Governor of Queensland, had proposed planting the 
gum trees in Italy twenty years ago, and had sent seed 
enough to have covered the Maremma with trees, but we 
see what has been done. 
Speaking with a Roman senator on the subject, he said it 
would take thirty years to grow the trees, and man was a 
shadow and could not look so far. I know that man is 
mortal, but have often heard that Rome is eternal, and it 
is for the future we must act. This senator had the same 
idea we have here of thirty years for a pretty strong stem, 
but now it is reduced to five with apparent certainty. 
These five years themselves may be reduced, because at two 
years the trees give out rich odour, and perhaps when still 
younger, and thus they begin to work almost at once, pre- 
paring wholesome habitations. The evidence seems to be 
