THE AMERICAN BOTANIST 25 



sirable wood for fence posts, porch columns, props and similar 

 uses. For more than a hundred years, locust wood has been 

 in demand for trenails, as the pins are called which hold the 

 timbers of ships together. According to Forest Leaves, a new 

 use for the wood has been found and a promising industry has 

 sprung up in places where the locust tree grows spontaneously 

 which consists in making the wood into insulator pins, which 

 carry the glass insulators on telegraph, electric light and tele- 

 phone poles. The small size of the pins, makes it possible to 

 use smaller locust trunks than are demanded by other uses. 

 Since the locust tree sprouts readily from the roots, the timber 

 supply of this wood is not easily exhausted, as some other 

 woods would be under the same system of cutting. 



Resistant Chestnut. — A note in Science suggests that 

 some specimens of the American chestnut tree may be naturally 

 resistent to the chestnut bark disease, which has swept large 

 areas of this country bare of chestnut trees and bids fair to 

 exterminate this valuable tree entirely. Living specimens, 

 however, have been found in a region from which the blight 

 had removed practically all the trees of their kind and other 

 specimens of chestnut have been found that are still thriving 

 in spite of the fact that they have been attacked by the disease 

 and bear healed scars to prove it. If these trees prove to be 

 really resistant, a new race of chestnut trees may be developed, 

 to take the place of the variety now rapidly nearing extermina- 

 tion. The resistence of the chestnut to the attacks of the 

 bark disease may also throw an important light upon certain 

 phases of forest botany. There are many regions on the 

 earth that show by their fossils, that trees now unknown to 

 the region, once flourished there. To account for the com- 

 plete disappearance of a species from a region, some climatic 

 or geologic cause has always been invoked, but who knows 

 how many times in the past, entire forests have been swept 



