NOTES AND QUERIES. 75 



are two floors, divided into six main rooms, with a long corridor 

 and some additional accommodation. As far as possible each 

 of the rooms is devoted to a distinct object. Thus one of the 

 three on the ground floor is designed for students of forest 

 botany. It is fitted up with wall and table cases, and in them 

 are arranged, in botanical sequence, hand specimens of wood, 

 fruits, seeds, photographs of specimen trees and other objects. 

 Cones and seeds of numerous conifers hardy in the British Isles 

 are well represented. The two other rooms and the corridor on 

 the ground floor are given up mainly to planks and sections of 

 trunks of trees, one room containing chiefly hardwoods, the 

 other conifers. Most of the planks have been cut from average- 

 sized rather than extra large trees, and they are shown in 

 lengths'of 5 or 7 feet, the width of the tree, including bark, and 

 3 inches thick. The trunk sections are 5 feet long, cut longi- 

 tudinally to show the tangential surface. Transverse sections 

 are cut-6 inches thick. Some difficulty was experienced in the 

 early days in getting transverse sections to withstand the dry 

 condition of the rooms without cracking. At the present time a 

 saw cut from the outside to the centre of each transverse section 

 is made whilst the wood is green. Contraction due to drying 

 opens the timber at this point, but general cracking is avoided. 

 Some of the planks shown are from ornamental trees, hence 

 they are more knotty than planks from forest-grown trees of 

 similar species would be. When selecting large timber specimens 

 for museum purposes, it is not advisable to choose sections 

 from dead trees, or from trees that have been allowed to lie for 

 some considerable time after being felled. Such timber is often 

 infested with boring beetles, and if introduced into a building 

 becomes the source of much worry and annoyance. A good 

 deal of worry has been caused in the Kew Museum in this way. 

 An idea of the extent of the wood collection may be gathered 

 from the fact that upwards of 200 species of trees grown in the 

 British Isles are represented by large or small sections of timber. 

 There are also numerous photographs of woodland scenery in 

 these rooms and in the corridor. 



The rooms on the upper floor are devoted to diseases, articles 

 manufactured from home-grown woods, and tools and models 

 of machinery. The disease room contains specimens of the 

 principal insect and fungus enemies of trees in the British Isles, 

 with numerous examples of galls and other minor injuries. 



