Page:The birds of Tierra del Fuego - Richard Crawshay.djvu/40

xx The Antarctic Beech has extraordinary powers of adapting itself to varied conditions of life, and grows up to the greater altitude of the two. In sheltered positions, it attains some five feet in diameter and perhaps a height of eighty feet. On exposed slopes, it becomes a tangled scrub, so dense as to be impermeable; so that the only method of negotiating it is by scrambling over, every now and then falling through. On mountain tops, it dwindles to the merest plant sprawling along the ground. King mentions a plant on Kater's Peak, which "though not more than two inches high, occupied a space of four or five feet in diameter."

The Evergreen Beech is of straighter growth, with smoother bark. In Nose Peak forest. I saw many trees four feet six inches in diameter and about one hundred feet high. Of this Beech. King says:—"Trees of three feet in diameter are abundant; of four feet there are many; and there is one tree (perhaps the very same noticed by Commodore Byron) which measures seven feet in diameter for seventeen feet above the roots, and then divides into three large branches, each of which is three feet through."

As to the relative sizes of these two Beeches, the widest divergence of opinion prevails as the result of individual experience. In solution of this. Colonel D. Prain suggests that "though both species grow together throughout the region where they occur, one species may in particular localities attain larger dimensions than the other, while again in different localities their sizes are reversed."

Winter's Bark is recognizable by its smooth greyish-green bark and Magnolia-like leaves. I did not observe this tree any distance inland, nor anywhere approaching the size recorded by Captain Stokes from Chili. At Port Xaviei-, a tree felled by his woodcutters measured eighty-seven feet in length and three feet five inches in circumference. The peculiar properties of Drimys winteri are mentioned by several of the early voyagers. Hawkins says:—"This Tree carrieth his fruit in clusters like