. 



tliat our lumber trade has quadrupled within the generation, the 

 business now employing about 150,000 men, and producing nearly 

 $250,000,000 worth of lumber. About $40,000,000 is invested in 

 this trade in Michigan alone, and the three states, Michigan, 

 Minnesota and Wisconsin cut, in the year 1880, over 7,000,000,000 

 feet of timber, in the form of marketable lumber, besides millions 

 of feet in the shape of railroad ties and other minor products. It 

 is estimated that the pine forests of the northwest will be gone in 

 about twenty or twenty-five years ; but the southern forests are of 

 much greater extent. It is not certain that we shall very soon be 

 entirely deprived of the light and comparatively soft growing 

 woods; but their extinction would seem to be but a matter of 

 time, and, as the lives of nations are counted, not a long time. 



Mr. Jessup has collected for the New York Museum of Natural 

 History some 400 varieties of North American woods, including 

 very many which are of very great value for constructive purposes; 

 some of these, as the sycamore, have not been as yet much used, 

 but are now being found to have peculiar value for special pur- 

 poses. The consumption of these hitherto neglected timbers will 

 continually and rapidly increase. Others, as the live oak of our 

 Gulf States, have been used exclusively for special purposes, as in 

 ship-building, and have, by the progress of improvement in the art, 

 been thrown out of use, to come in again at some later time in a 

 way as yet unforeseen. The soft woods are those which, from their 

 soundness and especially from the ease with which they can be 

 worked, are in greatest demand, and, fortunately, they are those 

 which have hitherto been most plentiful and cheap in our markets; 

 but they are gradually becoming less accessible and more difficult 

 of procurement; their cost is thus threatening to become seriously 

 increased, and we are likely to be compelled to find ways of sub- 

 stituting the hard woods for the soft in our constructions. A 

 century ago, oak was the most common of building timbers in the 

 older countries of the world ; it seems now possible that it, and 

 the other hard woods, may, in time, again come into general use ; 

 but, if so, we must, after a time, go into the southern and neigh- 

 boring states for such woods. Once we are brought to the use of 

 such hard woods again, we shall, perforce, be brought to the con- 

 struction of buildings capable of withstanding the teeth of time as 

 effectively as did those of our ancestors of the middle ages. 



