Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 169, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 August 1917 — FORESTS SURVIVE THE AGES [ARTICLE]

FORESTS SURVIVE THE AGES

Flora of Australia Different From That of All Other Countrioe In the World. One readily understands why the Australian loves his trees. The groves of giant eucalyptus form pictures never forgotten, and the scent of the wattle brings a homesick feeling like the smell of sage to the Westerner. The flora is not only beautiful, it is unique and has no counterpart in other lands, observes the National Geographic Magazine. Of the 10,000 species of plants most of them are purely Australian and are unknown even in New Zealand. The general impression one gets of Australian forests is their total unlikeliness to anything seen elsewhere. The great forests of timber trees are not damp and shaded and all of one speoles, but are well lighted and filled with other forests of shorter trees; in places the woods consist of large, widely spaced trees, surrounded only by bunch grass, and even in areas where water is not to be found on the surface for hundreds of square miles true forests of low trees are present. Forms which may be recognized as tulip, lily, honeysuckle and fern take on a surprising aspect. They are not garden flowers, but trees, and the landscape of which they form a part reminds one of the hypothetical period antedating our own millions of years. The trees are indeed those of a bygone age. In America and Europe shadowy forms of fossil leaves of strange plant species are gathered from the rocks and studied with Interest; in Australia many of these ancient trees are living. The impression that one is looking at a landscape which has forever disappeared from other parts of the world is so vivid that the elms and maples and oaks In some of the city streets strike a jarring note. The transition from Jurassic to modern times Is painfully abrupt.