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Split Belah makes good posts, and stands fairly well in the ground, but cannot be compared to 
Mulga and Gidgee. Round sappy posts soon rot in the ground.—(H. Y. Jackson.) 
The timber is excessively hard but brittle; it is much used for fencing posts.—(K. H. Bennett, 
Ivanhoe, via Hay.) 
The tree is a quick-growing, fast-decaying one, and it begins to die frequently before it has ceased 
growing. It is a rare thing to cut down a tree thoroughly sound throughout. The decay begins at the 
tap-root in the form of a white mould ; this works up into the heart, which becomes dry and hollow, and 
in course of time the whole tree becomes a pipe. The inside of this is excessively hard, and under the axe 
flies to pieces like glass. It is useless as a building timber, but the trees being straight, they are much 
used for log fencing and building rough stockyards.—(Richard Bennett.) 
Mr. Baker says :— 
The timber of this tree (Belah) is so characteristic that had Baron von Mueller intended his 
description to apply to this species he would have described or referred to so peculiar a wood. 
A 'priori argument is proverbially full of pitfalls, but as a matter of fact one 
specimen in the Melbourne Herbarium is labelled by Mueller:— 
C. glauca, Sieb., N.-W. districts of Victoria. Mr. Morton. Remarkable for the close texture of 
its wood. 
This specimen is a piece of Lockhart Morton’s type material of C. 
lepidophloia. Mueller, like other busy men, did not always label up his material in 
the herbarium, that is to say, when he described Irpidophloia he did not cancel all 
the glauca labels he had written for it. But such omission, while regrettable, in no 
way invalidates a species. Mueller’s statement that the wood is rather soft, not 
hard, is not correct in a general way, but the authorities I have quoted show that 
the timber is sometimes rather soft. 
As a very general rule Mueller omitted notes of timbers from descriptions of 
species, and the writer of the present article, who first gathered together a really 
comprehensive collection of logs of Australian timbers, accompanied by complete 
herbarium material, is the first Australian botanist who has insisted on the 
importance of timbers, kinos, and other natural products, as aids in the diagnosis of 
species—a modern innovation now generally accepted, at least to the extent that 
such material may usefully supplement twigs. 
Habitat-— The Belar is the commonest Casuarina of the interior, and it and 
Pine ( Callitris) are almost the only timber trees found there—in depressions of the 
land or actually moist localities. These big trees require more moisture than 
shrubby species, because the roots must go down deep to water. In this connection 
the following reply (based on Schimper) to a correspondent, who wrote to me asking 
why the great plains of New South Wales are apparently devoid of timber, may be 
of some interest:— 
The great grass-land plains of Australia are, when xerophilous, technically steppes , and xerophilous 
grass-land containing isolated tress is savannah. I take it that you are referring both to steppe and 
savannah country, for there is no hard-and-fast line between them. 
Now, in a tree, the transpiring surface (the leaves) is at a greater distance from the water supply 
in the soil than it is in the shrub or herb; besides this, the strata of air surrounding that transpiring 
