Hundreds upon hundreds of square miles of her territory are covered with forests of magnificent trees, many kinds of which are of great value to the house-carpenter, the machinist, and the ship-builder; but none of them more pre-eminently important than that which, in common conversation is called "native mahogany," "jarrah" in aboriginal language, and in scientific speech, "Eucalyptus marginata." The qualities of this wood may even bear the palm when placed in rivalry with heart of oak. The white ant, the Teredo navalis, and the barnacle are all alike foiled by its powers of resistance, but its most striking characteristic is, that it scarcely shows the slightest symptom of decay after being many years steeped in water. A log, which had formed part of an old bridge and had been seventeen years immersed, was exhibited in London in 1862, one of its sides being planed and polished in order to show the slight extent to which it had deteriorated. Although exposed to water for so long a period, and with three feet of its length sunk in mud, one inch alone was in a state that could have been described as less good than new. The harbour-master of Fremantle also drew attention in 1862 to the fact of two buoys of jarrah wood having been afloat in that port for eight years, and having needed no other repairs during that time than the supply of a few new iron hoops.
The timber which ranks next in importance to the jarrah, and is said, indeed, to be of nearly equal value to that wood for naval purposes, is another species of eucalyptus known to the colonists as the blue gum, which, in the words of an old report on the statistics of Western Australia, "attains to a very considerable growth in many
