172 On the Dry Rot. 
Although it was not thought necessary at that time to repair 
this ship below the middle wale, yet I have every reason to be- 
lieve that the poison had begun its work in her timbers, from 
light-water mark to her top-side, for in 1816 or 1817, in a perfect 
calm she sank at sea, a poor miserable decayed hulk, a melan- 
choly comment on the folly of cutting timber for vessels in the 
winter months. By inquiry since, I have always found, that of 
those vessels that last the longest, the timber of which they were 
constructed was cut the farthest from December. 
The facts in this case entirely changed my opinion. Before, 
I thought, because it was the general practice, that the winter 
months were the best season to cut timber in; now I began to 
reason, to examine, and to compare. I fully believed that the 
sap was the cause of the dry rot, and wherever that was stored 
away, at the death of the tree, there would it make its first at- 
tack ; I doubted, however, the botanical theory, that it is prinei- 
pally’ in its roots in the winter, and there protected from injury 
by the frost ; for I could not clearly see how the roots of the 
bireh, beach.and sugar maple, (although the quantity they will 
bleed in a season, is partly accounted for in their being supplied 
by the fibre roots,) could contain their sap; and if they could, 
how it could be protected from the frost there, any more than in 
any other part of the tree, when not more than one tenth part of 
the roots were below the frost. I was therefore determined to 
ascertain, if possible, where the sap reposed in trees, at different 
seasons of the year. 
Accordingly, necniee cut a small oak staddle, on or about the 
twentieth of June, 1815, I placed several pieces of it in the fire- 
place, and put fire under them ; after a little while, there appear- 
ed at the ends of the sticks a wet circle, describing the exact 
thickness of the alburnum, and when they became considerably 
heated, the steam rushed with violence from the tubes of the al- 
burnum, and there was but a slight appearance of vapor over the 
surface of the heart-wood. On or about the same day of the 
month of December, of the same year, I had another small oak 
staddlie eut, and went through with the same process with sev- 
eral pieces of it, and when they began to be heated, the whole 
surface of the heart-wood, except a small circle enclosing the 
pith, was wet, but the alburnum was dry, and when they were 
fairly heated through, the steam rushed with violence from the 
