130 The yournal of Forestry. 



for I could tear out large masses of a yellowish-wliite-looking, sweet- 

 smelling, spong}', elastic substance, reeking with wet, in which the 

 concentric rings could still be traced, separated by a ^Yhite soft pith-like 

 fungoid growth. This tree had some years before been seriously damaged 

 near the point of fracture, for there was a dark-coloured flesh-wound, and 

 a hole in this wood was lined by dry-rot, to a very limited extent. I 

 believe that in this case the dry-rot only acted as a wood- perforator to 

 flood with water the central parts of the tree, and I never met with another 

 case in Avhich dry-rot was associated with wet-rot. Mr. Menzies, the 

 highly-accomplished Deputy Surveyor of Her J\Iajesty's Woods and 

 Forests, looks upon wet-rot as a purely local disease, to be cured by 

 scooping out of the tree all its diseased wood, and by preventing the 

 access of water. I showed a bit of the spongy substance just described to a 

 country gentleman, and he told me it would turn to touchwood when dry, 

 but it is now tough and semi-elastic. ^Vlud is the ultimate siage of the 

 pathological process I have described ? What is the name of this fungus of 

 wet-rot ? 



Dry-rot. — In badly-built houses wood gets the dry-rot, or, in other 

 words, damp develops a fangus in dead wood, which soon crumbles it 

 down to the well-known russet powder. As this dry-rot of timber cannot 

 be called a disease, so in living trees the brown wood crumbling into a 

 rasset powder is not a disease, but the last stage of a prolonged process 

 of decay. Long before a tree shows the characteristic signs of dry-rot, 

 the wood has been deeply and extensively discoloured ; it also loses its 

 tenacity, and thus shows how deeply its mode of nutrition has been 

 perverted. One of the elms in the Long Walk, two hundred years old, 

 was lately cut down, and the whole trunk was of a deep brown colour, with 

 the exception of a few external rings of sound white wood. I should 

 suggest that the discoloration of the wood is no more the disease than the 

 crumbling wood and dust, and that the disease is some impairment of the 

 living force by which the tree started into life, and has been able to grow. 

 The disease calls to its aid a fungoid growth, to damage the texture of the 

 wood and to reduce it to powder. The real cause of the disease is, 

 therefore, some constitutional taint, rendering it as incurable as cancer. 

 In examining that portion of the elm that was broken across, after having 

 been nearly sawn asunder, it was beautiful to see the concentric deep 

 brown rings, separated by the broken ends of a white feathery fluff. If 

 that was a fungus, then it was already set in the changes that accompany 

 the discoloration of the wood. Later on, the reduction of the wood to a 

 red dust is brought about by the fungus of dry-rot ; but even if a fmigoid 

 growth were progressing from the top to the bottom of the tree, as in the elm, 

 I should no more call that internal fungus the disease than I would say a 

 tree was dying of the various fungi that disfigure its beauty and foretell 

 its death. Is the fungus of dry-rot the same in all trees ? Is it the same as 

 the fungus of tvot-rot? Is the fungus of drg-rot in a Tiring oalc the same as 

 ihatlof an oalien beam '? 



