128 TRANSACTIONS OF ROYAL SCOTTISH ARBORICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
CREOSOTED TIMBER. 
In a paper on ‘Timber as Used in Engineering Structures,” 
which was read before the Newcastle-on-Tyne Association of 
Students of the Institution of Civil Engineers, Mr J. R. Baterden, 
Assoc.M.Inst.C.E., states that creosoted timber withstands the 
teredo and other sea-worms indefinitely, where even greenheart 
has failed. He is only able to quote one instance of a creosoted 
pile being attacked, and in this case workmen had cut through 
the creosoted shell, and thus given the worm access to the 
interior. Even here, however, the damage done was confined 
to the unprotected heart. In the Gulf of Mexico, he states, 
creosoted timber is untouched after sixteen years, whilst the 
same class of timber used untreated is, in similar conditions, 
useless at the end of two years. He quotes Mr Preece as 
stating that in telegraph work he had never in the course of 
thirty years’ experience seen a properly creosoted pole show 
the slightest sign of decay. The Burnettised poles fixed in 1844 
on the London and Southampton and Gosport line, he alleged, 
had all failed within twenty-seven years; whilst a line of 
creosoted poles erected between Fareham and Portsmouth in 
1848 were as sound when taken up in 1883 as when first put 
down. The objections to creosoting, he says, are two in 
number—viz., the liability to fire, and the dirt inseparable from 
the process.— The Timber Trades Journal. 
Woop PRESERVATION BY ELECTROLYSIS. 
A new method of applying a preservative to railway ties and 
timber is described in L’/udustrie Electrique of Paris. The 
process consists of the artificial metallisation of the pores of the 
wood, the metal being deposited electrolytically. In brief, the 
method requires first the application of a solution of some salt— 
sulphate of copper, for example—by placing the wood immersed 
in the solution in a closed chamber and subjecting it to pressure. 
The wood is thus thoroughly impregnated with the solution. It 
is then taken out and piled up in layers in a concrete reservoir. 
The first layer of timber is immersed in the same copper sulphate 
solution, and also rests on a layer of jute or other fibrous material, 
