Canadian Forestry Journal, April, 1918 



1627 



New Silver From Old Stumps 



By James Lawler 



How Canadian Investigators in Forest Pro- 

 ducts Gave a New^ Lease of Life to Cobalt. 



Most people are familiar with 

 the saying of a great English Chemist 

 that he owed his success to his 

 practice of examining the waste mate- 

 rials left after his experiments were 

 over. But this work of supereroga- 

 tion on the part of the old-time 

 chemist has become the regular busi- 

 ness of the chemist, the physicist, 

 and the experimenter of today. 

 Everywhere these men are being 

 asked to make bricks without straw — 

 and it is a poor day when they do 

 not return to their taskmasters a 

 better brick than was made under 

 the old conditions. Why does the 

 -paper on which this article is printed 

 cost so much more than the common 

 news-print paper? Because half of 

 the material in the tree from which 

 the pulp was made by the chemical 

 process went out into the Ottawa 

 river, or the St. Lawrence river, 

 or the Welland canal in the "waste 

 liquor." Why does not somebody 

 get busy in the work of recovering 

 some of this wood material? Some- 

 body is busy. The Forest Products 

 Laboratories of Canada, under the 

 Forestry Branch of the Department 

 of the Interior have a staff of men 

 at work on this very problem, and 

 as they make an advance toward 

 its solution the results will be made 

 public for the benefit of 'the people 

 of Canada. This is one of the 

 ways in which the Dominion Govern- 

 ment is trying to link up science 

 and industry for the good of the 

 nation. 



Pine Oil Flotation 



That, however, is another story. 

 What this article endeavors to show 

 is how the waste wood material 

 which is usually left to rot, or which 

 is thrown away or destroyed in 

 the process of manufacture is being 



used to aid the mining industry. 

 There seems no connection between 

 stumps and mining, but when some 

 unconquerable chemist found that 

 the best means of extracting many 

 of the ores was the"pine oil flotation" 

 process, the stumps and waste wood 

 began to have a new value in the 

 eyes of mining men. 



Pine oil is a product secured 

 through the re-distillation of tur- 

 pentine which, in its turn, is pro- 

 duced commercially chiefly from the 

 "hard" pines of the southern United 

 States. Pine oil forms a very small 

 proportion of the oils produced from 

 the pine tree. It would be costly 

 under any conditions, but when 

 the discovery was made that, in 

 some cases, 20 per cent, more metal 

 could be extracted from the ores 

 by the oil flotation process than 

 by any other method the price 

 of pine oil went up to ten or fifteen 

 times its original price, and, as 

 the United States reduction com- 

 panies contracted for practically all 

 that was being made in the United 

 States, Canadian miners had either 

 to give up the process or get pine 

 oil somewhere else. 



Oils in Pines 



Northern pines, generally speaking, 

 are not high in their turpentine 

 content. In the Southern States 

 turpentine is gathered from the living 

 tree much as we gather maple sap. 

 but this method cannot be used 

 on Canadian trees. The only other 

 way is to get the turpentine out 

 of the wood by a process of dis- 

 tillation, and, as this turns the 

 wood tj charcoal, it is clear that 

 the chemist must lock for his tur- 

 pentine, not in the log piles of the 

 lumberman, but in the stumps and 

 waste wood left after the body 



