Climatic Effects of the Blue Gum.

Cromwell Argus, Volume V, Issue 220, 27 January 1874, Page 7

Climatic Effects of the Blue Gum.

M. Oimbert, who has watclW the result of planting the Eucalyptus Globulus, or common blue gum, in Algeria, writes as follows : " Within two or three years, they completely changed the climatic condition of the unhealthy parts of the colony. A few years later, its plantation was undertaken on a large scale in different parts of Algeria. At Pondook, twenty miles from Algiers, a farm situated on* the banks of the Hamiz, was noted for its extremely pestilential air. In the spring of 1807, about 13,000 Eucalypti were planted there. In July of the same year, the time when the fever season used to set in, not a single case occurred ; yet the trees were not more than nine feet high.Since then, complete immunity from fever has been maintained. In the neighbourhood of Constantina, the farm of Ben Machydlin was in equally bad repute ; it was covered with marshes both in winter and summer. In five years, the whole ground was dried up by 14,000 of these trees, and farmers and children enjoy excellent health. At the factory of the Gue de Constantine,' in three years, a plantation of Eucalyptus has transformed twelve acres of : marshy soil into a beautiful park, whence fever has completely disappeared. In the island of Cuba, this and all other paludean diseases are fast disappearing from all the unhealthy districts where this tree has been introduced. A stationhouse at one of the ends of a railway viaduct in the department of Var was so pestilential that the officials could not be kept there longer than a year-; forty of these trees were planted, and it is now as healthy as any other place on the line."

An amusing story is related in the Sporting Gazette respecting certain proceedings at the War Office. One of the clerks, in the exuberance of his animal spirits, fastened several yards of string to an umbrella, and then set up the article in the doorway of a public staircase to watch, the rosult. In the courso of half an hour about a dozen different persons saw the umbrella, and after a furtive glance around marched off with it, until suddenly pulled tip short by the string, when a roar of laughter from invisible spectators greeted .the discomfiture of each who had thus given way to temptation.