The Romance of Plant Life. Elliot George Francis Scott

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      More important in practice are the differences in the hardness and weight of wood. The Ironwood of India cannot be worked, as its hardness blunts every tool. It requires a pressure of something like 16,000 lb. to force a square-inch punch to a depth of one-twentieth of an inch in Lignum vitæ. Even Hickory and Oak (if of good quality) require a pressure of 3200 lb. to the square inch to do this. On the other hand the Cotton tree of India (Bombax malabaricum) has exceedingly soft wood. It is quite easy to drive a pin into the wood with the fingers.

      Some woods are far too heavy to float: many tropical woods are especially very weighty. Perhaps the Black Ironwood, of which a cubic foot weighs 85 lb., is the heaviest of all. But the same volume of Poplar, Willow, or Spruce does not weigh more than 24 lb.

      There are many ancient and modern instances of the extraordinary way in which timber lasts when at all carefully looked after. Thus the Cedar which "Hiram rafted down" to make the temple of Solomon (probably Cedar of Lebanon) seems to have been extraordinarily durable. Pliny says that the beams of the temple of Apollo at Utica were sound 1200 years after they were erected.

      Cypress wood (Cupressus sempervirens) was often used to make chests for clothes because the clothes moth cannot penetrate it, and it also lasts a very long time. There is a chest of this wood in the South Kensington Museum which is 600-700 years old. The Cypresswood gates of Constantinople were eleven centuries old when they were destroyed by the Turks in 1453. The fleet of Alexander the Great, and the bridge over the Euphrates built by Semiramis, were made of Cypress. This wood seems to have been of extraordinary value to the ancients, and was used for mummy cases in Egypt, for coffins by the Popes, as well as for harps and organ pipes.22

      Perhaps the most valuable woods are Box, which is used for woodcuts, and Walnut, which used to be highly prized for gun-stocks, as much as £600 having been paid for a single tree.

      But the most interesting histories of trade in timber belong to the commoner and more usual woods. The great woods of Jarrah (Eucalyptus marginata) cover 14,000 square miles of Australia, but they are being rapidly cut down and sawn up into small blocks to be carried right across the world in order to form the pavement which London cabmen and cab-horses prefer to any other.

      One remembers also the beautiful Deodar forests of Afghanistan, and the Himalayas. Logs of deodar were floated down the rivers to form bridges or temple pillars in Srinagar, the capital of far Cashmere. Nowadays great "slides" are made, winding down into the valleys from the recesses of the hills. When winter approaches, water is sprinkled on the logs which make the slide; this freezes and forms a slippery descending surface, down which the deodar timber rushes till it reaches the low ground, where it is cut up into railway sleepers and takes part in the civilizing of India.

      The fragrant Teak has an oleoresin which prevents the destructive white ants from attacking it; it is the most valuable timber for shipbuilding, and grows in many places of India, Malaysia, Java, and Sumatra. It floats down the rivers of Burmah, coming from the most remote hill jungles, and elephants are commonly used at the ports to gather the trunks from the water and pile them ready for shipment.

      The Birch is carried all the way from Russia to Assam and Ceylon, in order to make the chests in which tea is sent to England and Russia (native Indian woods are also used). It is also used in the distillation of Scotch whisky, for smoking herrings and hams, for clogs, baskets, tanning, dyeing, cordage, and even for making bread.

      But one of the most curious and interesting sights in any seaport is sure to be an old white Norwegian or Swedish sailing barque or brigantine. She will have a battered, storm-beaten appearance, and is yet obviously a comfortable home. The windows of the deck-house may be picked out with a lurid green. The tall, slowmoving, white-bearded skipper and his wife, children, and crew, not to speak of a dog and cats, have their home on this veteran "windjammer." She carries them from some unpronounceable, never-heard-of port in Norway, all over the world. You may see her discharging a cargo of deal plank, through the clumsy square holes in her stern, in a forgotten Fifeshire village, in Madagascar, in China, or in the Straits of Magellan. All her life she is engaged in this work, and her life is an exceedingly long one, to judge from the Viking lines on which she is built.

      Moreover, her work is done so economically that it used to be much cheaper to use her cargo in Capetown than to utilize the beautiful forests of the Knysna and King Williamstown.

      But there are not wanting signs that the forests of Norway, of Sweden, and even those of the United States, are doomed.

      It is said that seven acres of primeval forest are cut down to supply the wood which is used up in making the paper required for one day's issue of a certain New York journal. What a responsibility and a source of legitimate pride this must be to the journalists! Let us hope that the end justifies the means.

      Boulger calculates that in 1884 all the available timber from 4,131,520 acres of Californian Redwood was used in making the sleepers of the railways then existing in the United States.

      He finds that no less than 18,000,000 acres of forest are necessary to keep up the supply of sleepers for the old lines and to build new ones.

      So that, if we remember the wood required for paper, firewood, and the thousand other important requisites of civilized man, the United States must soon exhaust her supply and import wood.

      Then will come the opportunity of British North America. The Southern forest of Canada, which extended for 2000 miles from the Atlantic to the head of the St. Lawrence, has indeed gone or is disappearing into pulpwood and timber, but there is still the great Northern forest from the Straits of Belleisle to Alaska (4000 miles long and 700 miles broad), and in addition the beautiful forests of Douglas Spruce and other trees in British Columbia covering 285,000 square miles.

      It is the wood-pulp industry which is at present destroying the Canadian forests. The penny and halfpenny papers, and indeed most books nowadays, are made of paper produced by disintegrating wood: it is cheap, and can be produced in huge quantities; nevertheless it is disquieting to reflect that probably nineteen-twentieths of the literary output of the twentieth century will be dust and ashes just about the same time (some fifty years) that the writers who produced it reach the same state.23

      Yet, considering the amount daily produced to-day, the future readers of fifty years hence who are now in their cradles, may consider this a merciful dispensation of Providence.

      One very curious use of wood may be mentioned here. Near Assouan, on the First Cataract of the Nile, one discovers broken granite or syenite needles, which had been intended by the ancient Egyptians for monuments. Where the broken pillar lies, there are rows of wedge-shaped holes cut in the rock.

      They used to drive in wedges of dry wood and then wet them with water. The expansion of the wood split the rock, though this is hard granite or syenite. Very often the process failed because the stone cracked. The same method is said to be still used in some quarries.

      The destruction of the forest is really necessary. Most of the corn land and rich pasture of the world has been at one time forest. It could scarcely be such fertile soil if it had not been for the many years during which leaf-mould fell on it, and the roots broke up and penetrated the subsoil below. Canada, Russia, and the United States are now passing through the same experience as that of Great Britain in the time of the Romans, Saxons, and Danes.

      But there is terrible waste by fire.

      When the trees become dry and withered in the height of summer in either India or the United States, some careless tramp may throw aside a lighted match. If a fire once starts, it spreads with enormous rapidity; great clouds of smoke roll over the surrounding СКАЧАТЬ