The characteristic growth of Australia is the eucalyptus or gum-tree, in its many varieties, among which the blue gum is best known as widely transplanted to thrive in Europe and other parts of the globe. One species seems entitled to the distinction of being the tallest of trees, growing to a height of four hundred and fifty feet and more, so as perhaps to look down even upon the mammoth sequoia of California, which we have so impertinently renamed the Wellingtonia. The question of aerial precedence between these two, indeed, depending upon doubtful measurements, may be taken as not quite settled, and Uncle Sam is loth to admit anything of his as less than the greatest in the world; but he should know how Sir J. D. Hooker is quoted by Grant Duff as setting down his boastful mammoths for ugly trees, which is what no one can say of John Bull’s oaks. The isolated specimens of Australian vegetation cabined and cribbed at Kew, give no fair sample of the eucalyptus forests in which leagues upon leagues of bare straight stems, standing sullenly apart, will rise from a hundred to two hundred feet before throwing out their scraggy crown of dull and drooping foliage, that casts a thin unchanging shade upon the ground littered with peeling bark rather than with fallen leaves. In this monotonous scenery one might be grateful for our vernal woods and autumnal hedgerows; and still more so when lost in one of the “scrubs,” packed close with malicious dwarf trees, thorny bushes, spear-like grasses, and tangled heaths, that are the dry jungles of Australia’s inland plains.