86 Industrial Experiments in Colonial America. 



tion and importation of products which the American planta- 

 tions could furnish in return for British manufactures covered 

 a period of three-quarters of a century, beginning with the reign 

 of Queen Anne and continuing until the war of the Revolution 

 interrupted the commercial relations between the colonies and 

 the mother-country. The three groups of naval stores on 

 which bounties were offered were (i) tar and allied products; 

 (2) hemp ; (3) masts and timber. From the mercantilist point of 

 view, the legislation afifecting the first group may be regarded 

 as, on the whole, successful in stimulating importation; that 

 afifecting the second group, as an almost complete failure. The 

 history of the trade in timber differs in one important particular 

 from that in other species of stores, in that the former involved 

 something more than the mere exploitation of natural products 

 which could be exported with little or no expenditure of capital, 

 whether money or skilled labor, in the improvement of the soil 

 or of methods ; while trees were a natural product which merely 

 required the simple processes of felling and sawing to prepare 

 them for the market. The circumstances which were destined 

 to determine the success or failure of the encouragement of 

 masts and timber were of an entirely different character, in most 

 respects, from those which affected tar, pitch and hemp; they 

 will, therefore, be treated separately, in a subsequent chapter. 



