fiOO Forestry Quarterly 



The Mechanical Properties of Wood. By S. J. Record. John 

 Wiley & Sons, N. Y., 1914. Chapman and Hall, Ltd., London; 

 Renouf Publishing Co., Montreal. XI + 165 pages, 52 figures, 

 22 tables, $1.75. 



A notable addition to the series of books on forestry published 

 by John Wiley & Sons of New York is Record's "Mechanical 

 Properties of Wood." Record is Assistant Professor of Forest 

 Products at the Forest School of Yale University. In his chosen 

 field of Wood Technology he has already written one important 

 book, "Economic Woods of the United States," ^ which deals largely 

 with the structural and physical properties of wood and the means 

 of identif3nng the wood of different species. His present work is, 

 therefore, directly in line with his former, setting forth, as it does, 

 the mechanical properties of wood. 



The author develops his subject in three parts and an appendix. 

 Part one treats of the mechanical properties: tensile strength, 

 compressive strength, shearing strength, transverse strength, 

 toughness, hardness and cleavability. This material includes 

 numerous tables showing the various strength values of many of 

 the more important American woods. 



Part two deals with the factors affecting the mechanical proper- 

 ties of wood, such as rate of growth, heartwood and sapwood, 

 weight, density and specific gravity, color, cross-grain, knots, 

 various injuries, locality of growth, season of cutting, water 

 content, temperature and preservatives. 



In part three, the author describes the methods of timber 

 testing, taking as standard those followed by the Forest Service 

 of the United States Department of Agriculture in its work at the 

 Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin. 



This is suitably followed in the appendix by a sample working 

 plan used by the Forest Service in timber testing and by a table 

 showing the strength values of structural timbers. 



A bibliography and an index complete the work, which exhibits 

 throughout that excellence in printing and binding which we have 

 learned to expect from the publishers, and that painstaking 

 thoroughness for which the author is already known. 



First and foremost, this book will serve as a text in forest 

 schools and as such fills admirably a long-felt want in the subject 



1 Review in Forestry Quarterly, Vol. X, pp. 495-497. 



