[Reprinted from the JOURNAL OF THE FRANKLIN INSTITUTE, Oct., 1887.] 



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ON FLINT'S INVESTIGATION OF THE NICARAGUAN 



WOODS. 



By R. H. THURSTON, Director of the Sibley College of Cornell University. 



[Presented to the American Association for the Advancement of r 

 New York Meeting, August, i8Sj.~] 



PRELIMINARY REMARKS. BY R. H. THURSTON. It had long 

 been a conviction of the writer that the tropical and semi-tropical 

 countries of America possess a large number of valuable timber 

 trees of which nothing is known by our engineers or builders., but 

 which, for some of the more important purposes, as well as for 

 ornamental and exceptional constructions, may have extraordinary 

 value. As the process of stripping our own land of timber goes 

 on, and as our pines and finer grades of timber trees become 

 gradually more and more difficult and costly of procurement, the 

 necessity will become more and more pressing of going into the 

 more heavily forested countries nearer the equator for our supplies 

 of lumber. It is thus becoming continually more important that 

 we learn something of the resources of such countries, and 

 especially of the useful qualities of the woods available for building 

 purposes. A knowledge of the extraordinary strength, and of 

 the other valuable properties of some of these timbers, will un- 

 questionably, in time, lead to the opening of our markets to them, 

 and to a trade that may prove to be of inestimable advantage to 

 both purchaser and vendor. A few years more will see the great 

 forests of the Northwest stripped of their best timber, and the 

 supply will then be mainly drawn from the South and the Pacific 

 Coast ; but the enormous rate of growth of the country in popula- 

 tion, and still more in manufactures, will sweep those districts 

 clean at a rapidly increasing rate of destruction, and it will be 

 found, probably much sooner than is now generally imagined, that 

 we must look elsewhere for the enormous supplies demanded by 

 our markets. The growth of this demand is a geometrical one. 



That most remarkable of recent works on economical subjects, 

 that romance of statistics, Triumphant Democracy, gives some 

 striking facts abstracted from the last census. Mr. Carnegie finds 



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