DEMAND FOR LUMBER. 3859 
Ihave spoken of the foreign demand for American agricul- 
tural products as having occasioned an extension of cultivated 
ground, which had led to clearing land not required by the 
necessities of home consumption. But the forest itself has be- 
come, so to speak, an article of exportation. England, as we 
have seen, imported oak and pine from the Baltic ports more 
than six hundred years ago. She has since drawn largely on 
the forests of Norway, and for many years has received vast 
quantities of lumber from her American possessions. 
The unparalleled facilities for internal navigation, afforded 
by the numerous rivers of the present and former British colo- 
nial possessions in North America, have proved very fatal to the 
forests of that continent. Quebec became many years ago a 
be well worth the patronage of Governments in new countries, where they can 
be very easily made, without the necessity of much waste of valuable mate- 
rial, and without expensive arrangements for observation. 
The practice of stripping living trees of their bark some years before they 
re felled, is as old as the time of Vitruvius, but is much less followed than it 
deserves, partly because the timber of trees so treated inclines to crack and 
split, and partly because it becomes so hard as to be wrought with consider- 
able difficulty. 
In America, economy in the consumption of fuel has been much promoted 
by the substitution of coal for wood, the general use of stoves both for wood 
and coal, and recently by the employment of anthracite in the furnaces of 
stationary and locomotive steam-engines. All the objections to the use of 
anthracite for this latter purpose appear to have been overcome, and the im- 
provements in its combustion have been attended with a great pecuniary sav- 
ing, and with much advantage to the preservation of the woods. 
The employment of coal has produced a great reduction in the consumption 
of firewood in Paris. In 1815, the supply of firewood for the city required 
1,200,000 stéres, or cubic métres; in 1859 it had fallen to 501,805, while, in 
the meantime, the consumption of coal had risen from 600,000 to 4,320,000 
metrical quintals. See CLave, Etudes, p. 212. 
In 1869 Paris consumed 951,157 stéres of firewood, 4,902,414 hectoliires, 
or more than 13,000,000 bushels, of charcoal, and 6,872,000 metrical quintals, 
or more than 7,000,600 tons of mineral coal.— Annuaire de la Revue des Eaux 
et Foréts for 1872, p. 26. 
The increase in the price of firewood at Paris, within a century, has been 
comparatively small, while that of timber and of sawed lumber has increased 
enormously. ~ 
