328 Forestry Quarterly 



With various modifications, this system has been retained. The 

 present classification, which has been in force for about ten years, 

 recognizes four groups, the stumpage being highest in the first, 

 which includes some of the finest cabinet woods and some of the 

 most valuable construction timbers, and becoming progressively 

 less in the other three groups. All species not named in the 

 Manual as belonging to the first three groups fall into the fourth. 

 Now this list has two great defects; it includes, in the first place, 

 various species now known to be, on account of their small size 

 or limited distribution, of relatively little commercial importance, 

 and, on the other hand, fails to mention many large and abundant 

 species. The earliest work in the line of descriptions of Philip- 

 pine woods was naturally based on these lists in the main; it 

 was only just beginning to be realized how small a portion of 

 the field they covered, and even had the writers of that time at- 

 tempted to go beyond the limits of the official lists, the explora- 

 tion of the forests and the collection of authentic material had not 

 progressed far enough to furnish means for describing other 

 species. 



The second publication on wood technology was Bulletin 4, 

 Bureau of Forestry, 1906, by Rolland Gardner, entitled Mechani- 

 cal Tests of Thirty Philippine Woods, followed in 1907 by a 

 second edition containing tests of four additional species. This 

 work, as its title indicates, contained little material that would aid 

 in identification. 



In 1907 also, there was published in the Philippine Journal of 

 Science, the first work devoted entirely to the subject of minute 

 structure and identification, namely, Philippine Woods, by F. W. 

 Foxworthy. This work, based on the same list as Hillsman's 

 notes, contains a key arranged according to the minute struc- 

 tural features, very detailed descriptions, and fifty-five micro- 

 scopic photographs of cross sections with a magnification of 

 about five diameters. It was written with the purpose of assisting 

 the average wood-user to identify commercial woods with no- 

 apparatus more elaborate than a sharp knife and a good pocket- 

 lens and it undoubtedly contributed a great deal to a better 

 knowledge of the subject on the part of trade school teachers and 

 others engaged both in the production and consumption of lum- 

 ber. It was this work that first brought to the attention of the 

 public interested in wood the fact that the prime means of iden- 



