PAPER FROM WOOD PULP 



from 4,131,520 acres of Californian Redwood was used in 

 making the sleepers of the railways then existing in the 

 United States. 



He finds that no less than 18,000,000 acres of forest are 

 necessary to keep up the supply of sleepers for the old lines 

 and to build new ones. 



So that, if we remember the wood required for paper, 

 firewood, and the thousand other important requisites of 

 civilized man, the United States must soon exhaust her 

 supply and import wood. 



Then will come the opportunity of British North America. 

 The Southern forest of Canada, which extended for 2000 

 miles from the Atlantic to the head of the St. Lawrence, has 

 indeed gone or is disappearing into pulpwood and timber, 

 but there is still the great Northern forest from the Straits of 

 Belleisle to Alaska (4000 miles long and 700 miles broad), 

 and in addition the beautiful forests of Douglas Spruce and 

 other trees in British Columbia covering 285,000 square miles. 



It is the wood-pulp industry which is at present destroying 

 the Canadian forests. The penny and halfpenny papers, and 

 indeed most books nowadays, are made of paper produced by 

 disintegrating wood : it is cheap, and can be produced in 

 huge quantities ; nevertheless it is disquieting to reflect that 

 probably nineteen-twentieths of the literary output of the 

 twentieth century will be dust and ashes just about the same 

 time (some fifty years) that the writers who produced it reach 

 the same state.^ 



Yet, considering the amount daily produced to-day, the 

 future readers of fifty years hence who are now in their cradles, 

 may consider this a merciful dispensation of Providence. 



One very curious use of wood may be mentioned here. 

 ^ Compare the report by the Society of Arts. 



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