GATHERING NAVAL STORES. 477 



the weather, rain and sun and storm, and wears as well outdoors 

 as inside. 



Here is the place to state that, until recently, architects, 

 builders, and engineers had a prejudice against using pine timber 

 that had been bled of its sap for turpentine. They claimed that 

 the bleeding process weakened the tensile strength of the timber. 

 This was disputed, of course, in the South. In order to settle this 

 important question, as the yellow pine lumber industry had 

 grown to enormous proportions, the National Bureau of For- 

 estry undertook a series of careful tests three or four years ago. 

 It was shown by experiments that the sap comes from the sap- 

 wood, leaving the heart wood unaffected, and hence the prejudice 

 against bled timber is not founded in fact or reason ; in other 

 words, after the pine wood has been tapped, its tensile strength, 

 according to these tests, remains equal to that of virgin growth. 



The value of the naval stores produced in the United States is 

 about ten million dollars per annum. Nine tenths of all the 

 naval stores used in the world come from the pineries of the 

 Southern States. The other one tenth is furnished principally by 

 the forests of France and Austria. 



The most careful figures of the total production of naval stores 

 in the United States are those gathered by the special agent of 

 the Division of Forestry for the year 1890. They show the total 

 production of these stores to be three hundred and forty thou- 

 sand casks, or seventeen million gallons of spirits of turpentine, 

 and one million four hundred and ninety thousand barrels of resin 

 of different grades. 



In order to produce this amount of naval stores it is estimated 

 that about two million three hundred thousand acres are being 

 worked, and that about eight hundred thousand acres of virgin 

 forest are invaded every year to supply the turpentine stills. At 

 this rate it will not be many years before the effects of reckless 

 cutting, sapping of timber, and fires will be felt in the long-leaf 

 pine belt. As a matter of fact, there has been a steady decline 

 in the production of naval stores during the past ten years in 

 every Southern State except Georgia, and there the increase has 

 been due to the opening of new tracts of timber made accessible 

 to shipping points and markets by railroads. 



There is no doubt that the American process of bleeding the 

 pine trees is crude and wasteful, and that the turpentine workers, 

 like the lumbermen, conduct their operations on what has been 

 bluntly termed " the robbing system." What else is it but rob- 

 bing, when the turpentine operators strip the land of its forest 

 resources, and leave only desolate wastes ? It is now time that 

 our turpentine workers introduced better methods and necessary 

 changes in their business. 



