THE MANUFACTURE OF HOME-GROWN TIMBER. 1a) 
X. The Manufacture of Home-grown Timber. By A. T. 
Witiiamson, Edinburgh. 
The ever-changing conditions under which the industries of our 
country are conducted, and the revolutions that are continually 
taking place in the production of commodities, naturally affect the 
demand for the raw materials that are necessary for the production 
of the manufactured article. In this respect the preparation of 
no other raw material has been more liable to change from time 
to time than that of home-grown timber ; in fact, the substitution 
of foreign for native produce, the adoption of varieties for the 
same purpose, and the new industries brought into existence by 
the inventor’s genius, have within the past few years almost com- 
pletely revolutionised the methods of conversion of timber. The 
modes of cutting-up, and the purposes to which a tree was applied, 
say, twenty years ago, would be considered by the timber mer- 
chant of to-day as utterly wasteful. In this paper I propose to 
give a brief outline of the most economical methods of cutting out 
the various kinds of timber, and the uses to which each variety is 
applied, with a few hints on the utilisation of the enormous amount 
of waste that is necessarily produced by the conversion of round 
timber into square scantlings, a matter which, in the present keen 
competition, is one that is perpetually exercising the minds of 
the convertor, and on which to many the question of a profit or 
loss in the conduct of his business altogether depends. The con- 
troversial subject of the cutting-up of timber on the site of the 
forest by means of a portable sawmill, although coming within 
the scope of such a paper as this, has so many sides to it that it 
may well form an interesting and lengthy paper by itself. How- 
ever, the remark may be made in passing that there is an increas- 
ing disposition to encourage the mechanical inventor in his efforts 
to furnish appliances better adapted for the more effective and 
economical conversion of round timber in the precincts of a forest. 
I will begin by taking up each kind of tree separately, and 
begin with that favourite tree of which it is said not an atom need 
be wasted from the root to the acorn, viz., the oak. The past fifty 
years has completely revolutionised the uses to which the oak is 
put. In the industrial world it still takes a high place, and 
innumerable are the purposes for which it is used, but the largest 
