y2, Forestry Quarterly. 



The wood is very heavy, hard, strong and externally durable in 

 contact with the ground. Its many virtues are offset by so many 

 disadvantages such as small size, crooked growth, knottiness, de- 

 fective heart, difficulty of working, liability to split, as well as 

 meagre supply, that for only a few uses is it well adapted. The 

 principal use is for fence posts which consumes about 4,000,000 

 annually. Its only virtue for this purpose is its durability, since 

 most of the posts are undersized and so crooked that it is difficult 

 to adjust them to a fence. Their use is confined almost exclu- 

 sively to wire fences. The demand for them exceeds the supply 

 and a region of 30,000 to 40,000 square miles in northeastern 

 Texas and southern Oklahoma has few posts of any other wood. 



About 10,000 to 12,000 wagons with Osage Orange felloes are 

 manufactured annually. The demand for such wagons is largest 

 in dry, warm localities with roads comparatively free from stones. 

 The wood swells and shrinks but little under climatic changes and 

 long, hot seasons and dry sandy roads constitute conditions where 

 the Osage Orange rim gives best service and where it is reputed 

 to be superior to all other that have been tried. Tires do not 

 work loose, but will sometimes wear out without need of resetting. 

 The wood is hard to shape, dulls the tools very quickly, is usually 

 available only in short pieces and is unsuited for use on rough 

 roads where the shock of jolting will split felloes made of it. 

 There appears to be little future for the felloes business in this 

 timber for it is estimated that the present rate of cutting will 

 exhaust the wagon material in three or four years. 



Other products of the timber are bridge piling, house blocks, 

 telephone poles, insulator pins, policemen's clubs, canes, rollers, 

 parquetry, tobacco pipes, and wagon spokes. The total annual 

 consumption for all purposes is estimated to be 26,000,000 feet 

 B. M. A drain much smaller than this will soon deforest the 

 remaining areas of standing timber which if grouped in one body, 

 would probably not exceed 400 square miles in area. Even if 

 every tree of the species in Texas and Oklahoma were cut, it is 

 doubtful whether there is enough to hold out ten years at the 

 present rate. 



S. J. R. 



