200 THE NEW FORESTRY. 



as the shakes cannot be seen till the tree is felled. This 

 disease, or whatever it may be called, is much dreaded, and 

 is, we believe, worse in Scotland than in England, and in thin, 

 exposed woods, the probable reason of which will be shortly 

 explained. The extent of the losses sustained by ring-shake 

 in oak woods may be gathered from a report of a sale of 

 timber on the Haystoun estate, near Peebles, which appeared 

 in the " Scottish Farmer" of November 5th, 1898, and which 

 states that : " Oaks have become almost an impossibility 

 on the Haystoun estate on account of the prevalence of ring- 

 shake. A considerable number of what would otherwise 

 have been valuable timber trees were seen to be badly 

 affected, and are thus reduced to very little over firewood 

 value." 



In " star-shake " the cracks radiate from the centre to the 

 outside of the stem, or nearly so, but in shakes produced by 

 frost the cracks extend inwards from the outside, always 

 leaving a seam in the bark where it has healed over. These 

 outside cracks are well-known to be due to frost, and so- 

 probably are those found radiating from the centre. Both 

 ring-shake and star-shake may be found in the same tree, and 

 when that is the case the tree is perfectly useless except for 

 firewood. 



As regards ring-shake, the following case, which came 

 under our own observation, points strongly to frost and expo- 

 sure, from sudden over-thinning at mature age, as the cause of 

 the evil. In 1868, a heavy fall of oak timber was taken out 

 of a fairly dense wood, which was also well-furnished with tall' 

 underwood that was sold at the same time. The timber was 

 sold standing, and was sound when felled, there being very 

 few shaken trees in the lot. About twenty-five years later 

 another fall was bought by the same purchaser, from the 

 same ground, and so many of the trees were ring-shaken as to 

 cause serious disappointment to both vendor and buyer, the 

 latter having felt confident that the trees would fall as sound 

 as before. The only explanation of this we can think of is 

 that the removal of the underwood and the thinning, in the 

 first fall of 1868, deprived the trees of the shelter they had 

 been accustomed to and permitted the cold and frost to reach 

 the trunks. Owing to rabbits and the dense crop of bracken 

 that had overspread the wood before 1868, the underwood 

 never grew up again, and its removal, together with the 

 thinning of the oaks, probably affected the trees left. Hartig 

 draws attention to the fact that the bark and tissues of a tree 



