8o North American Forests and Forestry 



with logs. The larger mills now usually run day 

 and night during the season, since the electric arc 

 light has made it possible to do this. Very often 

 a planing-mill stands next door to the sawmill, 

 so that the raw lumber may at once be finished. 

 The grading and sorting of lumber, that is, its clas- 

 sification according to quality, is one of the most 

 difficult tasks of the skilful sawyer, and can be well 

 done only after long experience. There are very 

 many grades of lumber recognized in the markets, 

 and unfortunately no great uniformity prevails. 

 The various grades are known by technical names, 

 such as clear, select, culls, and the like. They are 

 based principally on the freedom of knots and the 

 texture of the wood, especially the proportions of 

 sap- and heart-wood. The average quality of the 

 lumber reaching the market has very much deterio- 

 rated during the last twenty-five years. During the 

 early days, when the profits of lumbering were 

 much higher on account of the abundance of ma- 

 terial in easily accessible places, only the best trees 

 were taken. At present the lumberman brings to 

 the mill every stick of timber out of which a board 

 can possibly be cut, and naturally much of this stuff 

 is knotty, crooked, and sappy. 



While in the old days the lumberman was con- 

 fined to the neighborhood of logging streams, be- 

 cause it would not pay to haul logs far on land, 

 this is no longer true. Now, when there is no 

 convenient river to float his logs, he builds a rail- 

 way into the heart of the pinery. Somewhere 



