THE USES OF WOOD 



THE PLACE OF THE WOODEN ROOF IN CIVILIZATION 



BY HU MAXWELL 



Editor's Note: This is the fourth story in a series of important and very valuable articles by Mr. Maxwell on wood and Its 

 uses. The series will thoroughly cover the various phases of the subject, from the beginnings in the forest through the processes 

 of logging, lumbering, transportation and milling, considering in detail the whole field of the utilization and manufacture of wood. 



IF the groves were God's first temples, doubtless the 

 trees were man's first shelters. The canopy of bough 

 and leaf broke the sun's rays and shedded the rain 

 while primitive hunters and root diggers huddled beneath. 

 Nature provided that shelter, but nature did not, in that 

 particular, go far enough to satisfy the wants of men, 

 and they learned to cut boughs and lay rude roofs on 

 crude shanties. In the earliest shelters of that kind, the 

 walls were probably branches also. That was a very old 

 type of human den or domicile, and the period of its 



beginning dates farther back in the past than history or 

 tradition goes, and it is left for us to imagine what we 

 like concerning the first builders of brush houses. But 

 our knowledge of later builders of that class of roofs 

 rests upon something more substantial than imagina- 

 tion. It may seem strange, but it is nevertheless 

 true, that such huts and such roofs are still being 

 built, not only in tropical lands where lizard-infested 

 thatches of leaves shelter human beings, but in some 

 instances bough roofs keep the rain and sun off Ameri- 



ROOF OF BOUGHS AND WALLS OF BRUSH 



This is a twentieth century penthouse in a Michigan forest, but it is doubtless very similar to shelters of limbs and leaves built in many 

 lands during thousands of years of human development. Present day men sometimes go back to primeval conditions, by necessity or for 

 pleasure. In a snow storm this is a better shelter than none at all 



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