54 TRANSACTIONS OF ROYAL SCOTTISH ARBORICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



himself, was briefly as follows : — A large collection of forest 

 products (timbers, resins, fibres, oils, medicines, etc.) had been 

 prepared for the Paris Exhibition of 1878. The describing and 

 cataloguing of these led to the adoption of a system of lettering 

 and numbering which subsequently was continued to denote a 

 classification of the forests of India. Eight areas of supply 

 had been lettered as H. P. O. C. E. D. W. and B. As a 

 catalogue of the 3636 timbers of the first edition was raised 

 apparently to 6655 ^^ ^^^ second, nothing could have been 

 simpler or more useful, and the figures just mentioned show the 

 gigantic labour that had to be faced by Mr Gamble in the first 

 great attempt to examine and describe the structural peculiarities 

 of the timbers of India. But as a classification of the forests of 

 India it would seem unsatisfactory. 



Opening the volume by chance at " Terminalia," it is found 

 that six pages of the original work and nine pages of the 

 second issue are devoted to that genus. But of the former, 

 two and a half pages, and of the latter, about three pages, are 

 taken up with recording the numbered blocks of timber that 

 had been collected and described. Now these numbers can be 

 of little use, except to the officials of the museums in which 

 duplicate sets of the timbers have been preserved. It would 

 accordingly seem that the first and second editions having 

 recorded these numbers, they might be omitted from all future 

 issues. The enumeration given in the Appendix seems, for all 

 practical purposes, sufficient. The removal from the text of 

 the tabular statements of these numbers might reduce the work 

 very materially, and thus allow of expansion in other directions. 



We read of Indian timbers finding their way into the 

 markets of Europe, and of being used in the fittings of 

 important public buildings. But the commercial names used 

 for these timbers in the English public press do not occur in 

 Mr Gamble's work (such as laurel-wood, silver-grey, white 

 mahogany, etc.), and so it is impossible to follow up this 

 modern development. 



The time has come when a satisfactory and general nomen- 

 clature must be agreed upon and adopted by foresters, botanists, 

 and timber users. The necessity for the standardisation of 

 forest terminology, and the correct identification of timbers and 

 standardisation of their trade names, was the subject of one of 

 the resolutions passed at the British Empire Forestry Confer- 



