500 BIOLOGY FOR BEGINNERS 



(d) Railroads use 2500 ties per mile there are about 200,000 

 miles in U. S. and the ties have to be replaced every seven 

 years; this means the use of about 70,000,000 ties per year. 



2. Paper. A single New York daily newspaper uses for paper the spruce 



trees from 44 acres per day. 



The greatest amount of paper is made in New York, Wisconsin, and 

 New England. 



3. Fuel. Coal is indirectly a forest product as it is the carbon from trees 



of ages ago, partly decomposed under the earth by heat and 

 pressure. 



4. Naval stores. These are so called because tar and pitch are used in 



connection with ship building and cordage. The crude pitch is 

 obtained by notching the southern pines and collecting the product - 

 which is distilled, making tar, turpentine, and rosin. U. S. ex- 

 ports seven times as much turpentine and ten times as much rosin 

 as any other country. The value reaches $36,000,000 per year. 



5. Tanning materials. Quebracho and other tropical woods could be 



included. 



6. Maple sugar. U. S. produces 50,000,000 pounds and 4,000,000 gallons 



of syrup per year, of which Vermont and New York supply over 

 three-quarters. 



7. Spruce gum. This gum forms in masses on the bark of spruces and is 



gathered and cleaned in the winter. Really fine gum is worth 

 several dollars a pound. 



8. Distillation products. Various kinds of hard wood are heated in 



closed iron cylinders, destructive distillation goes on, charcoal 

 remains in the cylinders and the other products go off as vapors and 

 arq condensed and separated. We will learn more about this in 

 chemistry. For the present notice how many products there are. 

 and for what various and important purposes they are used. 



FOREST ENEMIES 



Man. Valuable as they are, forests have many enemies, and 

 strange as it may seem, one of the worst of them is man. Of 

 course we destroy much standing timber for necessary use and 

 for clearing for agriculture, but much more is utterly wasted in 

 other ways. Annual growth in the United States is 7,000,000,000 

 feet but the annual consumption totals over 20,000,000,000 feet. 



Careless lumbering, in which only a few trees are used and many 

 destroyed, or wasteful methods, by which only one-fourth of the 

 cut timber ever becomes lumber, are some of man's methods of 

 attack. Cutting hemlock and using only the tan bark, leaving 



