168 



to travel miles after miles with your view narrowly closed upon either side by 

 flat, unrelieved, unbroken woods, of ungainly and half-developed trees, is a thing 

 far more wearying to the sight than even a journey over the bare wilderness of 

 the prairie. Then, whenever the continuousness of thick woods is broken, it is 

 apt to give place to something not more cheerful. Here you come into the 

 clearing made by some recent fire, where the crowd of living and struggling trees 

 has been burned into a few bare, blackened poles, standing in their gaunt unsight- 

 liness, the ghosts of their former selves, with other blackened logs and branches 

 lying strewn over the scorched ground. Again, you plunge into the forest, and 

 see it as it makes itself without the ordering hand of man now dense, and now 

 thin trees of different kinds, not generally blended together in intermixture, 

 but standing apart as nature has sorted them ; and as, in the great struggle for 

 existence, every kind ousted from elsewhere has been forced into the station best 

 fitted for its support ; trees of all ages fighting together for bare life ; some 

 vigorous and freshly green, and feathered down to the very ground ; some weakly 

 and faded, and only flinging out here and there ragged and ill-balanced branches; 

 some that are mere dead corpses and have fallen aslant out of their places, bruising 

 and breaking the living ; some that, with their lower branches all torn and maimed, 

 have yet stretched up out of the throng, and seem as if straining all the life 

 within them to peer over the heads of their fellows, and catch glimpses of how 

 the fire, their deadliest enemy, is spreading havoc nearer and nearer. Again, you 

 are once more in open grounds, lately cleared by some settler, who has ploughed 

 and sown among the tree stumps, those broken columns of the forest ruin ; fenced 

 in his clearing with the rude zig-zag wall of logs, the universal snake-fence of 

 the country ; built up his log hut in the midst, and set himself to that task which 

 takes half the lifetime of a man to carry out, the turning of forest land into a 

 farm. After many hours of such a journey, and after many days of similar 

 journeyings, the English traveller will not find himself thinking less fondly o 

 the more smiling landscape at home."' 



THE WASTE IN WORKING SQUARE TIMBER. ECONOMIES IN THE TIMBER 



TRADE. 



Concerning the great waste from the preparation of hewn timber, as hereto- 

 fore practiced, the Commissioner of Crown Lands for the Province of Ontario, in 

 his report for the year 1879, says : 



" The great loss sustained yearly by the Province and the revenue from 

 waste of valuable material in the manufacture of square and waney pine, 

 especially in connection with the former, which is hewn to a " proud edge," has 

 for some time occupied my serious attention. It is estimated on good grounds, 

 that one-fourth of every tree cut down to be made into square or waney timber 

 is lost to the wealth of the country, and that the revenue suffers proportionally. 

 When the tree is cut down, it is lined off for squaring, and the " round " outside 

 of the lines is what is called beaten off on the four sides ; the wood thus beaten 

 or slashed off in preparation for hewing by the broadaxe is the prime part of the 

 tree, from which the best class of clear lumber is obtained when the timber is 

 taken in the round to a saw-mill. Besides the destruction of timber of the finest 

 texture and greatest value, there is the upper portion of the tree, near to and 

 partly into the top, which would yield lumber of an inferior quality, it is true, 



* Sketches from America, by John White, Fellow of Queen's College (1870), p: 166. 



