AMERICAN FOREST TREES 147 



durable wood when exposed to weather. The largest reported use of the 

 wood in New England is by box makers. Massachusetts alone works 

 nearly 15,000,000 feet a year into crates and shipping boxes. Its 

 uses in the Lake States are more varied. The makers of berry, fruit, and 

 vegetable baskets draw supplies from the wood. Some of the product 

 is of thin split slats, and other of veneer or sawed material. 



The light weight and white color of balsam fir make it acceptable to 

 the manufacturers of excelsior. The product is employed in packing 

 merchandise for shipment, and to a small extent in upholstery. The 

 wood fills a rather important place in the woodenware industry, where 

 its white color and light weight constitute its most important recom- 

 mendations. It is sawed into staves for pails and tubs. 



Though balsam fir has little figure and its appearance is rather 

 common, it finds its way to planing mills and woodworking shops where 

 it is made into ceiling, newel posts, molding, railing, spindles, chair- 

 boards, and other interior finish. 



The most widely known commercial product manufactured from 

 this tree is Canada balsam. Strictly speaking, it is not a manufactured 

 article except what is done in nature's laboratory, and the product is 

 the resin stored under bark blisters. The resin is transparent, and is 

 employed by microscopists in mounting objects for examination. Little 

 machinery or apparatus is used in removing the viscid fluid from the 

 pockets in the bark. With a knife the thin, soft blister is slit and the 

 resin is scraped out. All kinds of claims of medicinal virtue are made 

 for balsam resin in the region where the tree grows; but the treatment 

 in most cases effects cures if any cures are really effected by appeals 

 to faith and the imagination. 



Balsam fir owes a large part of its importance to its abundance. It 

 is not exactly a swamp tree, but it does best in damp situations where 

 the ground is moist and cool in summer. Only in periods of protracted 

 drought does the ground litter become sufficiently dry to burn fiercely, 

 and to that fact is due much of the promise of future supply of balsam 

 fir. That which grows on the dry uplands may fall prey to forest fires, 

 but that in the damp flats, associated with northern white cedar and 

 tamarack, will hold its ground and continue to supply demand. 



Balsam fir has an importance which can not be wholly measured 

 in feet, pounds, cords, or dollars. Many of the choicest Christmas trees 

 which in December go by tens of thousands to the cities, are of this tree. 

 Its form is almost perfect, being conical, broad near the bottom, and 

 running to a sharp apex. The deep green of the needles, which retain 

 their color from two weeks to a month after the trunk is severed, gives 

 balsam Christmas trees much of their popularity. The trees are cut 



