Page:A Voyage of Discovery and Research in the Southern and Antarctic Regions Vol 2.djvu/443

Rh The country improves in appearance approaching Hamilton, becoming more open, now and then swelling into picturesque wooded hills.

The township occupies the bottom of a green valley, and the beautiful grounds of Lawrenny appear through a finely wooded vista beyond it.

On Macquarie Plains I visited the remarkable silicified fossil-tree, imbedded in a vertical position in vesicular lava. Its height above the ground is six feet; circumference, seven feet three inches; and diameter, at the top, fifteen inches. The wood is silvery white, and covered with the finest silicified filaments of a white satin-like hue, resembling in tenuity the finest blown glass. The bark remaining near the base has a yellowish brown resin-like appearance, and when broken, rivals in lustre and beauty the finest agates. The locality of the tree forms the extremity of a ridge of rock of the same kind in which it is imbedded seventy feet above the river, which is here twelve feet in breadth, winding through a wooded ravine one hundred yards across.

A little further down the ridge, is another specimen also vertically imbedded in a chimney-like cavity on the steep face of the igneous rock, the lower portion having disappeared, the cast left by it in the rock is a foot in diameter, and seven feet in length. In the soil beneath, I found a fragment of it having an opaline lustre. About two miles from Rose Garland, near a reach of the Derwent, I saw excavations in a low ridge of scoria, from which two other silicified trees had been removed some years ago. These had also been vertically imbedded, and I found small silicified fragments of them scattered about the spot. All these trees appear to have been coniferous. Five miles from Rose Garland, and twenty feet above the bank of the river Derwent, a bed of sandstone crops out from the adjacent basalt, dipping forty degrees to the S.W., and enclosing cylindrical masses of greenstone from eighteen to twenty inches in diameter, and six feet in length;