S(J Mr. tjrilbert Burnett on the Decay 



wind and water/where the others are most perishable, will ever 

 establish its pre-eminence e.^ the naval oak ; for when thus ex- 

 posed to atmospheric influence, as Nichols writes in the work 

 already quoted, '^ the trueEnglish wood, for firmness, strength, 

 and durability, is preferable to any other for ship-building, 

 and is well known all over the world.'' 



As the botanical diagnosis, however, serves only when we 

 can procure either fruit or leaf, and as soil, disease, or too 

 rapid growth, niay probably, I think frequently, deteriorate 

 the timber even of the true naval oak ; as cupidity may fell 

 trees that are immature, and mistake or fraud purvey, as true 

 naval oak, timber of the other species or of foreign growth, a 

 test by which the prospective durability of wood designed for 

 important uses, as for ship-building, &c., may be computed 

 by experiments on samples, cannot be esteemed a useless ap- 

 plication of science to the common purposes of life ; and I doubt 

 not your willingness to devote a few pages of the Journal of 

 Science to the present observations, which shall conclude with 

 a notice of some rudimentary trials which promise fairly to 

 achieve this end, and which, although it would be wrong to 

 generalize on so comparatively few experiments, I am in- 

 duced to publish in the present form, that my views may be 

 corrected or verified sooner, and on a larger scale, than they 

 could be by individual means ; and that persons, having opportu- 

 nities to procure specimens of timber from different countries, 

 from different soils in this island, and of different kinds, ages, 

 &c. &c. &c., even if they do not wish to be at the trouble of 

 examination themselves, may forward them for me to the 

 Royal Institution, that I may test their relative value. 



It may not be improper to state, for the information of those 

 unversed in physiological enquiries, that wood, even of the 

 most solid, firm, and hardest kinds, is entirely composed, as 

 to its intimate texture, of tubes and cells, differing in size, form, 

 and situation, in different tribes of plants, and more or less 

 replete with matter of very different sorts, upon which its 

 chief strength and substance, and all its most important 

 characters as timber principally depend. In the light and 

 porous woods of many quickly-growing trees, as the poplar, the 

 ligneous matter deposited one season, is, in great part, reab- 

 sorbed to support the rapid increase of the next ; but in the 

 heavy, firm, and solid wood of more slowly-growing trees, for 



