Page:The Present State and Prospects of the Port Phillip District of New South Wales.djvu/133

 peculiarly inflammable. This produces an extraordinary effect in those forests where they have been singed, as most of them have been, by the bush-fires. You see a thick forest of peculiarly straight trees, reaching to about one hundred and twenty feet in height, and without a branch for about seventy or eighty feet from the ground, with their round, straight stems perfectly black, while the branches at the top, and the underwood at the bottom, are of the most brilliant green, looking as if a forest of gigantic ebony rulers had taken to budding like Aaron's rod. It is a singular fact, that the white gum sheds its bark every year. When this process is completed, the trees of this species have the appearance of having been stripped of their bark* their smooth, white stems forming the strongest contrast with the black trunks of the stringy bark, with which they are sometimes, though not often, mixed; for here, as I believe in most aboriginal forests, one tree, with its appropriate underwood, prevails for miles, and then another as exclusively occupies the adjoining tract, there being but tittle intermixture, save on the confines of their respective domains. Though all the trees of the Eucalyptus family have leaves so very much alike, (something similar also to the English sally tree,) yet does the dissimilarity in the bark create such a difference of character, that two trees can scarcely be more unlike than the iron bark and the box tree; the former with a rough bark, something like that of the cork tree, and of a rich brown colour, while the bark of the latter is of a silvery white, very much resembling that of the British ash. This illustrates a remark which I have