Szechwan, owing, according to tradition, to earthquakes some two centuries ago, landslips occurred which have buried whole forests in certain places beneath the soil. The dead timber is now being dug out, and is in an excellent state of preservation, being redder and more fragrant than the ordinary timber. It is known to the Chinese as fragrant Cunninghamia, hsiang-sha, and sells for extraordinary prices, selected thick planks for coffins often being worth £12 to £60 a piece.
The wood, according to Mayr,[1] is extraordinarily light, with a broad sap-wood and a dark yellow heart-wood. It is used extensively in the coast ports of China for making tea-chests.
Cunninghamia appears to be confined as a wild tree to China; but it is occasionally planted[2] in Japan, the Loochoo Islands, and Formosa. M. Hickel has lately received seeds from Tongking, but these may have been gathered from cultivated trees. (A.H.)
Remarkable Trees
The growth of this tree in England depends mainly on the amount of heat in summer, which in most places is evidently insufficient; and though it endures severe winter frosts without much injury on well-drained soil, it suffers much from wind and frost in spring. It rarely ripens seed in this country, the only case I know of being a tree at Penrhyn Castle which is now dead, but from whose seed some young trees were raised. The best of these, when I saw them in 1906, was about 10 feet high.
The tallest trees of this species that we know are at Killerton, where, in 1904, there were two which measured 62 and 60 feet in height by 4 feet in girth. One of these has since been cut down, its branches having become ragged, and a section sent to the Kew Museum shows the age to be at least 63 years. Another, at Bicton, was, in 1906, 56 feet by 4 feet 10 inches, also rather ragged in its branches. There is a tree at Highnam, in Gloucestershire, about 25 feet high.
At Heanton Satchville, the seat of Lord Clinton, in North Devon, there is a slender but healthy-looking tree 50 feet by 3 feet, and another one which has thrown up a shoot from the stool. At Escot in South Devon, the seat of Sir John Kennaway, Miss Woolward measured one in 1905, 45 feet high. At Pencarrow in Cornwall Mr. Bartlett showed me a tree, planted by Sir W. Molesworth in 1850, which was in 1905 40 feet by 4 feet 8 inches, and one of the healthiest that I have seen; and there is a smaller tree, 30 feet by 4 feet, at Coldrinick, in the same county.
Coming farther east there is a splendid tree at Bagshot Park, the seat of H.R.H. the Duke of Connaught, which, when I saw it in May 1907, was no less than 47 feet high by 7 feet in girth, and 48 yards in the circumference of its branches, Being on very well drained soil, and well sheltered by other trees, it has suffered
