Evolution in Sazvmill Indusrty. 39 



much of this material as is needed is used in the mill's power 

 plant while the remainder is shipped, together with the sawduat, 

 to an alcohol plant. Other Puget Sound plants are making similar 

 beginnings but these opportunities are not open to the interior 

 mill unless exceptionally well situated. 



Conclusion. 



I have drawn on the Puget Sound region for illustrative ma- 

 terial because of greater familiarity with that region. The same 

 principles apply elsewhere, however, though sparsely timbered 

 regions will have use for more small mills than well timbered 

 regions. 



On the basis of the foregoing it seems a safe prediction that in a 

 few years a mill situated in a center of population, but which 

 destroys sawdust, slabs, and other material now generally waste, 

 in a waste burner instead of putting them to some use, will be 

 looked upon much as a packing house would be to-day which did 

 not utilize horns, hoofs, bones, etc., as useful by-products. On 

 the other hand, the small mill in the interior has, or will have, no 

 better chance of utilizing sawdust and similar by-products than 

 the country butcher has of utilizing the hoofs and horns of cattle. 

 It is no more reasonable to suppose that the concentration com- 

 mon to all modern industry will be discontinued in the lumber in- 

 dustry than it is that the packing industry will return to the 

 country butcher stage. Even the use of this small mill waste as 

 fuel, as could readily be done for generating electric power, would 

 save thousands of tons of coal annually. 



It is safe to say that the typical mill of the future will not be 

 the small mill. The small mill will undoubtedly have its place for 

 supplying small communities just as the small butcher shop now 

 has its place for the same purpose. For supplying large or dis- 

 tant market it is now and will become still more an inefficient in- 

 dustrial unit. The material now wasted by the small mill in the 

 forest is coming to have commercial value in centers of popu- 

 lation or industrial centers where it accumulates in sufficient 

 quantity to be utilizable. It can be most cheaply transported to 

 those centers in the log, both because it thus bears a lower freight 

 charge and because it is more cheaply handled in that condition. 

 Thus, logs in Puget Sound, and other bodies of water, can be 



