Preserving Wood Posts for Fences. 



Where anything like a fair price can be realized for rough timber 

 instead of sawing it into paling rails for home use, there can be n 

 doubt that it is better management to sell the wood, as a more 

 effective and cheaper fence can be erected with wire. 



Wooden palings are things of the past, they are behind the age, 

 and for permanent fences it is only in special places and on a very 

 limited scale that paling is preferable to wire. The same cannot 

 be said with regard to posts. Wood makes a very good intermediate 

 post, and in general fencing is likely to hold its own for that purpose 

 as against iron. 



The liability of stobs to decay at the surface of the ground is no 

 doubt a serious objection, and if this could be entirely remedied, a 

 decided advance in fencing would be effected. This is the vulnerable 

 point in a wooden post, and we fear even with the very best method 

 of preserving, that it will always, more or less, be subject to pre- 

 mature decay at this particular place. Although stobs decay first here, 

 and have to be rejected, if the top post is at all sound they need not be 

 discarded altogether, there are still a variety of estate purposes for 

 which they can be used — such as repairing old hedges that have got 

 somewhat open below, piles for protecting river embankments from 

 the encroachment of floods, for strengthening another fence, where 

 economy is the first object, by driving down to the second or third 

 wires, and on moorland where a cheap fence is wanted to define a 

 sheep-walk. The Marquis of Tweeddale's factor introduced on the 

 estate of Yester a method of preserving posts which I think worthy of 

 notice in your Journal of Forestry. 



The wood was peeled, and the stobs stacked for two or three months 

 to dry ; they were afterwards placed in a large square iron tank and 

 boiled in coal tar for twenty-four hours, by which time the tar, if the 

 post be of white wood, will have penetrated pretty well into the 

 fibre. 



Where the wood is young and soft-grown, I consider this a very 

 good mode of preventing rot. The very high temperature in which 

 the wood is placed, and that for such a length of time, not only expels 

 any natural sap that may have been retained, but, to a large extent, 

 it also impregnates the cells with the tar. This is where "^the chief 



