this valley saw no more Araucarias. The range of the tree, therefore, seems a very narrow one, from about the Antuco valley in lat. 37 0 30' S. to about lat. 40° 30' S. I was told by one or two persons that an Araucaria is found in the neighbourhood of Lake Nahuelhuapi, and was in great hopes of discovering a new species or variety, but when I reached the Limay river I could hear nothing of such a tree. If any isolated groves or specimens of it exist so far south, I should suppose them to have been introduced by seeds dropped by the Indians, Libocedrus was the only coniferous tree I observed between Junin and the Limay river, and that never attains any great height.
Yet this remarkable tree, Araucaria imbricata, has been so imperfectly studied by modern travellers that I think the conditions under which it grows are worthy of being described fully.
Miss North, in her account of her Chilean journey, describes the Araucaria forest which exists on the coast range (called the Cordillera de Nahuelbuta) west of Angol in lat. 38°, where its habitat is completely isolated from the Andes,
Poeppig describes the conditions under which he saw it in the district of Antuco a little farther north, which appears to be almost, if not quite, its northerly limit. I first saw it at about 4,000 feet or a little lower on the Sierra de Pichinitron, in the upper part of the Renaico valley on the road from San Ignacio to Lolco in lat. 39°. Here it grew on exposed ridges sometimes mixed with beeches and sometimes alone, and did not attain such large dimensions as it does farther south. It seeds freely and in places where fire had not gone through the forest I found many young seedlings which appeared to grow at about the same rate as in England. Its bark is thick and rugged when old and is divided into large tabular bosses.
I did not see any old trees which had kept their lower branches; when old the tree has almost always a flat top formed by densely crowded branches near the summit, I should say that it attains a maximum height of ninety to a hundred feet and an average girth when adult of ten to twelve feet, but I measured one tree which was about twenty-four feet in circumference.
On February 5th, the weather, which had been almost uniformly clear, hot and windy, broke up, and we had several wet days after this which much interfered with my collecting. At Junin de los Andes we found Colonel Perez, commanding the 3rd Argentine Cavalry, who invited me to return with him to San Martin, a new military settlement at the east end of Lake Lacar, which was occupied by his regiment. The watershed which forms the frontier is here so ill-defined that I crossed it without being aware of the fact.
Near here there is a very striking volcanic peak called Lanin, which I had seen from several points on my route, and which is of great height (12,041 feet), but I was unable to visit it from want of time. The scenery round Lake Lacar is very beautiful and I have no doubt that San Martin will one day be a favourite resort in the Southern Andes. Though at an elevation of under 3,000 feet the winter climate is sometimes severe, and the snow lies so deep that in the first year that it was occupied by