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Remarkable Wood Preservation 





Nature's work haa nuin's beaten ti> a stamlstill. A saiiiplc of 

 wood preservation, discovered at La Hrae, near Los Angeles, Cal., 

 proves this. The modern timber engineer thinks he is doing pretty 

 well if, by the use of oils and poisons, he ran lengthen the life of 

 wood two or threefold; if he can add ten or twenty years to the 

 period a log will last. 



Generally speaking, it is nature's way of working to destroy the 

 old and use the material in building something new. The ]ioet ex- 

 pressed it : " The granite rocks disorganize to feed the hungry 

 moss they bear." Decay, the world over, is simply a process of 

 preparing material for a new creation. Forests have been rotting 

 since and before the carboniferous age, and the process still goes on, 

 yet there is no decrease in the 

 amount of forest. Nature is no 

 miser, hoarding away valuable 

 things, but believes in use. Yet, 

 occasionally, nature becomes a 

 miser and saves something by 

 "withdrawing it from circula- 

 tion." In the damp woods of 

 Washingtou and Oregon instances 

 are well known where fallen tree 

 trunks, buried in moss, have re- 

 mained sound several hundred 

 years. Cedars lying in the bot- 

 toms of New Jersey swamps have 

 still longer records. But the 

 periods during which these have 

 been preserved are brief indeed 

 when compared with the record 

 of a piece of redwood tree found 

 in a natural deposit of asphaltum 

 in southern California. 



Asphaltum is supposed to be a 

 product or a by-product of pe- 

 troleum. It exists in veins and 

 ledges, nearly as hard as stone, 

 as in the "uintaite" of Utah, 

 and the "manjak" of the Bar- 

 badoes; as lakes of the consist- 

 ency of pitch, as in Venezuela; 

 and as deposits of various sorts, 

 on the surface of the ground or 

 beneath it, in many parts of the 

 world. 



During the present year some 

 remarkable finds have been made in asphaltum deposits at La Brae, 

 near Los Angeles. A pit has been unearthed which has been termed 

 "the prehistoric animal trap," because it was filled with bones of 

 extinct animals, embedded in the asphaltum. The discovery is at- 

 tracting wide attention from scientists, and in some ways it is the 

 most remarkable ever made in the world. The circumstances under 

 which the bones are found indicate that ages ago a pool or well of 

 soft asphaltum existed there, with an opening at the surface of the 

 ground, and that animals in their wanderings through the region 

 ventured on the surface of the treacherous tar, sank, perished, and 

 accumulated at the bottom. Thirty tons of skeletons have already 

 been taken from a pit fifteen feet in diameter, and the bottom has 

 not yet been reached. 



Not only is the quantity of bones remarkable, but the kinds are no 

 less so. Among them is the three-toed horse, the buffalo, giant sloth, 

 elephant, camel, mastodon, saBer-tooth tiger, and others. They have 

 not yet found the skeleton of the neolithic man, but they are looking 

 for it. More saber-tooth tiger skeletons have been taken from that 

 pit than have been found in all the rest of the world up to the pres- 

 ent time. The evidence seems conclusive that beasts of prey fre- 

 quented the place to feed on animals which had stuck in the soft 





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STKUCTUKES OF ANCIENT AND MODERN REDWOODS COMPARED 



The LaBrae redwood on left, moderu redwood ou right. A A. medullar.v 

 rays; B B. summerwood. The common wood cells are perpendicular. The 

 small circles on the cell walls are openings connecting one cell with an- 

 other. Through these the sap of living wood circulates. The ancient 

 and modern woods are drawn on the same scale, considerabl.v magnified. 

 Note the fineness of structure of the LaBrae specimen compared with the 



asphaltum, and were themselves caught in the treacherous magma and 

 perished with the victims on which they had attempted to feed. 

 Judging by the enormous collection of bones, the trap may have 

 been at work hundreds of years. It caught more beasts than were 

 ever seen in any menagerie froni'Eome's coliseum down to Barnum's 

 day. 



The famed and beautiful valleys of Los Angeles had different in- 

 habitants then from those there now. Huge mammals, both her- 

 bivorous and carnivorous, must have been appallingly abundant. The 

 buffaloes were larger than those of today; the giant sloths were 

 capable of devouring vegetation in amounts to equal the work of the 

 hippojiutamns in the sudd fields of the Nile, and the size of the- 

 skeleton of the three-toed horse 

 seems to identify it with what 

 scientists have called ' ' the forest 

 horse, " " the fleetest quadruped 

 that ever lived on earth. ' ' 



The man who deals in wood will 

 be interested in what the pit con- 

 tains in his line. A hint as to 

 what trees then grew on the Los 

 Angeles hills is interesting. A 

 log was found standing on end in 

 the midst of the bones. A small 

 piece of the wood has been ex- 

 amined for Hakdwood Eecord, 

 and it bears witness to many 

 things calculated to inspire seri- 

 ous thought. 



How old is it ? No man knows. 

 Its geological age has been de- 

 termined within certain limits, 

 but this cannot be expressed in 

 years. It has come down from 

 early pleistocene time, if its age 

 is judged by the company in 

 which it was found. Though that 

 time is recent, as the epochs of 

 geology and astronomy are reck- 

 oned, it belongs in unrecorded 

 antiquity, measured by human 

 history. Man may have been, and 

 probably was, on the earth when 

 the log found lodgment in the as- 

 phaltum where it has lain ever 

 since, but there is no sure way 

 of determining the time in years. It was before the close of the 

 Glacial age, perhaps before its beginning. The time antedates the 

 intrusion o'f the fields of ice from Canada, which pushed southward 

 two thousand miles, reaching within five hundred miles of the Gulf 

 of Mexico. 



It is probable that the presence of polar ice so far south — which 

 period or periods must have lasted several hundred thousand years — 

 drove the sloths, camels, and other tropic animals out of what is now 

 the United States, or froze them to death. If the La Brae animal 

 trap ceased to gather in prey before the ice invasion from the north, 

 an age of 500,000 years seems conservative for the log in the as- 

 phaltum pit. 



An examination of the wood under the microscope reveals several 

 most interesting facts. It is of the sequoia genus, an evergreen, cone- 

 bearing tree with thick, stringy bark. It is closely related to the 

 present day "redwoods" and "bigtrees" of California. It is 

 probably an extinct species, but its near relationship is obvious. The 

 exceedingly slow growth is remarkable. The annual rings are so close 

 together that the naked eye cannot distinguish them. From ninety to 

 one hundred of them are required to measure an inch. The only 

 modern trees matching that in slowness of growth are those found 



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