The Forest Products Laboratory 



denced by wooden wheels taken from tlie monuments of ancient 

 Egypt. In these same mounds are found the earhest recorded form 

 of plows, made from wood, with iron tipped wedges. With these plows 

 man acquired his first crude knowledge of extensive agriculture, and 

 he used them, with slight modifications, until the first half of the 

 eighteenth century. 



With wood, man learned to build homes and create architecture; 

 to construct ships and master navigation ; to build bridges and develop 

 the science of mechanics ; to generate steam and harness its power for 

 transportation. Modern electric and magnetic science owes its birth 

 to fossil resin from coniferous forests which were prehistoric when 

 Pliny, seventy years before the dawn of Christianity, recorded the fact 

 that amber, when rubbed, acquired the power of attracting straws. 

 Thus, in diverse ways, fundamental principles have first been worked 

 out from wood, and the knowledge thus gained — primitive though it 

 may now appear — has been applied in developing the use of stone, iron, 

 steel, concrete and other materials. The process still goes on. Within 

 a decade, man has conquered the air with a wooden plane and is today 

 applying the results of his experiments to the fabrication of an all 

 metal machine. 



It is a striking fact that through the agency of wood, man has 

 acquired more fundamental knowledge of related subjects than he 

 has of the properties of wood itself. In the development of his wood 

 craft, he has been likened to the growing child who, building with 

 })locks, acquires an ever larger consciousness of their adaptability to 

 new figures as experience matures his mind. Spin-red by personal 

 needs and the rewards of commercialism, however, man fashioned wood 

 into many scores of standard products, about which trade-crafts took 

 shape and became clearly defined through many centuries of compe- 

 tition and zealous individualism. He thus built up a great diversified 

 mass of wood-using lore, based, not upon a scientific knowledge of the 

 many diff'erent kinds of wood used, but upon rule of thuml) methods, 

 beliefs, customs and prejudices, passed down from one generation to 

 another as expanded by the increasing complexities of each changing 

 age. 



Into this accumulated mass of trade practices, business methods, 

 and usages built up through the years, there was injected, even up to 



