45 



CONSERVATION 



many of the failures of creosoted piling are 

 due to this cause. 



With other forms of timber the effect may 

 not be so quickly seen or so disastrous, but 

 in a similar manner decay may extend to 

 the interior through any untreated portions 

 communicating with the exterior. 



Government Studying Yellow Pine 



A study of conditions in the yellow-pine 

 forests of the Southwest, made during the 

 past season by the United States Forest 

 Service at the recently established Coconino 

 Forest Experiment Station, has brought out 

 very strikingly the difficulty of securing nat- 

 ural reproduction in this type of forest. 



In northern Arizona, perhaps at least half 

 of the forest is without young growth of 

 any kind, and old cuttings are frequently 

 barren wastes. The most important factors 

 in bringing this about are the climate, fire, 

 methods of cutting, disposal of brush, and 

 grazing; in most cases two or more of these 

 factors work together in preventing repro- 

 duction. 



While the study has not yet been com- 

 pleted, the preliminary results are of great 

 practical interest and value, and point to 

 the methods of management which must be 

 used in this type of forest. Light cuttings, 

 disposal of the brush by lopping and scat- 

 tering, and the exclusion of sheep until the 

 cut-over areas have a satisfactory young 

 growth, are recommended. 



Magazines Pushing Conservation 



The magazines are giving a good deal of 

 space to the conservation question. The 

 Annals of the American Academy of Polit- 

 ical and Social Science for May and The 

 Chautauquan for June are special conserva- 

 tion numbers, and worthy of careful study. 



Vanishing Forest Giants v 



Says the Waterbury (Conn.) Republican: 



"The lumbermen cut down a hemlock tree 

 455 years old in the Adirondacks near Utica 

 the other day. It measured thirty-three 

 inches in diameter at the butt. So slow is 

 the growth of the few great trees that re- 

 main of the virgin forests of the East that 

 this hemlock was forty years old when Co- 

 lumbus discovered America. Yet it was less 

 than a yard in diameter. You can find in 

 our ruined woodlands stumps of first-growth 

 timber that was five or six feet in diameter 

 when cut. There are old houses in Con- 

 necticut and Massachusetts in which you can 

 see doors, a yard or so wide, that were 

 sawed out of one board. It must have 

 taken at least ten generations to grow such 

 trees. 



"Such timber is now found only on the 

 Pacific coast. The Seattle Exposition man- 

 agement is boasting of a Forestry building 

 with a colonnade of fir logs five feet in diam- 

 eter. Indeed, the contract for the erection 

 of the building reads that the wooden pillars 

 should not exceed five feet in diameter, so 

 that the contractor should not supply larger 

 logs because they happened to come handier. 

 But the Pacific coast will come sooner or 

 later to our condition." 



Wood'waste Distillation 



As evidence of the growing interest in the 



distillation of wood-waste may be noted the 

 establishment of a publication, "The Wood- 



waste Distilleries News," which first ap- 



peared in Cleveland, Ohio, in May. Its 

 editor is Carl von Hartzfelt, M. C. 



RECENT PUBLICATIONS 



"The Principal Species of Wood : Their 



Characteristic Properties." By Charles H. 



Snow, Dean of the School of Applied 



Science, New York University. 

 Large 8vo, xvi+2O3 pages, figures in the 



text; 37 full-page half-tones. Cloth, $3.50. 



John Wiley & Sons, New York. 



The second edition of "Principal Species 

 of Wood," issued last year by Prof. Charles 

 H. Snow, of New York University, will be 

 gladly welcomed by those who are familiar 

 with the first edition, and should prove of 

 interest and value to wood users in general. 

 The new edition keeps the same arrange- 

 ment and discusses the characteristics of the 

 different species in the same way as the 

 first, but the typographical errors present in 

 the first edition have been corrected and the 

 whole book slightly enlarged. Considerable 



additional material is contained in the in- 

 troduction, in which the author takes up 

 more fully the structure and uses of wood, 

 the life of trees, and discusses briefly the 

 subject of forestry. The misspelling of 

 "humis" for "humus'' is unfortunate, but the 

 material contained in the discussion of this 

 and related topics is trustworthy. 



The book is intended chiefly for engineers 

 and for those who are interested in the 

 structural properties of timber ; but, in spite 

 of its technical character, contains much 

 material of interest to the general reader. 

 It is attractively published and contains a 

 great deal of valuable information regard- 

 ing the different species of American woods 

 which has never before been brought to- 

 gether in such available form. 



S. T. D. 



