Their average height was 80–90 feet, and the diameter 2–3 feet, and the branches were mostly confined to the top of the tree, where they form a dense, flat-topped crown. On 27th January I saw much finer specimens in the valley above Lolco, on the road to Longuimay, and my companion, Mr. Bartlett Calvert, was successful in getting some excellent photographs which are here reproduced. Plate 17 shows the appearance of mature and young trees growing in an open grassy valley at about 4500 feet, with the high volcanoes of Longuimay and Tolhuaca in the background. The old tree on the right of the picture is about 90 feet, and the young one about 20 feet high, showing sixteen years of growth from a point 2–3 feet from the ground where the annual growths could no longer be distinguished. I therefore suppose this young tree to be twenty to twenty-five years old from seed.
Farther on in the same valley we came to much larger trees, which showed the curiously irregular slabs of bark of which Miss North speaks. The largest trees I saw had a girth of 24 feet at breast height, and were 90–100 feet high. The longest fallen stems I measured were little over 100 feet, and I should say 80–90 was the average height of full-grown ones. Plate 18 shows the habit which the trees assume when grown thickly at about 3500 feet elevation in the upper Villacura valley.
On the wind-swept ridges which we crossed higher up the pass, at an approximate elevation of 6500 feet, the Araucarias were much more stunted and had a very different habit of growth, but the high wind which prevailed, as it usually does at this season, made it impossible to photograph them. Two days later at Los Arcos, the frontier post of Argentina, I found scattered groves of Araucaria for about fifty miles south, as far as the valley of Quillen, but when we reached the country about the head-waters of the Pichelifeu river, about lat. 39° 30' S., I saw no more except a few isolated trees which appeared to have sprung up from seeds dropped by the Indians on their old camping grounds.
I had previously been told by Mr. Barton of Buenos Ayres, who is engaged in cutting timber on the north shore of the great lake Nahuelhuapi, about 100 miles to the south, that the Araucaria was found near this lake, and I had great hopes of discovering and introducing a new southern variety or species, which might prove hardier than A. imbricata.
But notwithstanding what Poeppig says as to the probability of its extension as far south as lat. 46°, I saw not a single tree on my journey from San Martin via Nahuelhuapi to Puerto Montt in lat. 41° 50', and none of the explorers who have been recently employed in surveying the frontier have, so far as I know, found it south of about lat. 41°. Sir T. Holdich is my authority for this statement.
Some of the trees here had much smoother bark covered with long tufts of grey lichen, and in this part of the forest there were plenty of young seedlings coming up, some of which I took up and unsuccessfully attempted to transplant to my friend's garden at San Ignacio.
The geographical range of the tree is therefore a very limited one, extending only from Antuco in about lat. 38° 40' to lat. 40° in the Cordillera, and on the coast range from about lat. 38° 30' to an unknown point probably not south of about lat. 41°. For, though Poeppig says it occurs on the Corcovado, he was speaking only from
