MICHIGAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 211 



steel or wheat, and witliout those forests the war was most certainly lost. 

 Ships in a hurry? Millions of feet of long leaf pine and Douglas fir, pinned 

 locust and live-oak and calked with pine pitch. Cypress lifeboats with oars of 

 ash and spruce. 



Air and hydroplanes? Ash for alierons, spruce for wing-beams, maple 

 and birch veener for fusilage, cedar for pontoons, wing "dope" cut in acetone 

 and propellers of walnut and quartered oak. 



Artillery? Wheels of oak, wooden escort wagons. Shells? Machined 

 with high-speed tools made from charcoal iron ; shrapnel bedded in rosin. 



Infantry ? Their rifle butts were of walnut ; their clothes were dyed with 

 osage-orange ; their shoes were tanned with extract of hemlock and oak bark 

 and chestnut wood ; their trench tools wei'e handled with hickory and ash and 

 maple ; their gas masks w^ere filled with charcoal from the shells of nuts ; their 

 supplies were shipped in wooden containers and their rations were put up in 

 fibre packages. 



Hospital supplies? Chloroform and iodoform come from the products of 

 wood distillation. 



Dugouts and trenches? Shored up with timber. Roads impassable with 

 mud? Curduroy and puncheon. Telescopes and range-finders? Their lenses 

 were mounted in Canada balsam. 



Cavalry? Saddle trees were of basswood, stirrups of ash. 



Was anything more essential than England's coal ? The worst phase of 

 the English coal situation was in the getting of pit-props. 



Did great sections of the United States verge upon utter disorganization 

 and calamity for lack of fuel? The local woodlots came to the rescue v^^hen 

 nothing else could have come. Did Germany lack for cotton for textiles and 

 explosives? She used a wood pulp base and went on. 



Must a half dozen new ports be equipped, harbor works, docks and ware- 

 houses complete within a few weeks? Put a regiment of American foresters 

 and lumlier-jacks into the old French forests and the necessary piling and 

 lumber is on hand in time. No other materials could have done such work ; 

 none other could have been gotten in time. 



The list goes on indefinitely. Uncover the machinery of war at any point 

 and there the forest will be found at work. 



In war or in peace it is not a question as to whether there should be 

 forests, or what kind of forests or where or how many. Save in abnormal 

 times one does not argue thus concerning wheat or corn. With them, supply 

 and demand regulate price and price regulates supply and the supply is forth- 

 coming from those lands which can most economically produce wheat or corn. 

 Within a few months a new crop can make good a previous deficit ; a surplus 

 results in resti'icted acreage in the succeeding year. The carry-over and the 

 production period with usual crops involves but a few weeks, and within a 

 relatively few weeks great stimulation results in great crop increases. But a 



