56 NEW BRUNSWICK FORESTRY CONVENTION 



board, and the reasons for quartering valuable logs before they are allowed, 

 to dry, can be taught very easily by demonstrations of that sort ; not by 

 mere telling, but from actual observations of what goes on under the noses 

 and eyes of the children right in the room. 



We then go into the faults and defects of lumber ; not from the book 

 point of view, but from the point of view of the wood pile in the corner of 

 the school room ; because the boy makes his working drawing, calculates the 

 amount of lumber that he will have to cut out from which to make his article, 

 and then goes to the rack and selects it himself. Therefore our first lessons 

 are devoted to the commonest defects we find ; for instance, the defect of 

 sapwood, which is one of the commonest we meet with in several of the 

 woods. Then there are other defects shewn by the specimens here, such as 

 rot, sapwood attacked by insects, while the sound heartwood is left ; large 

 knots, loose knots, dead knots, the various forms of shakes, worm-holes, etc. 

 Then comes the classification of the trees, first, by the trees, and second, by 

 the nature of the wood. Most of our boys know the names of the trees and 

 can identify them, although even here in New Brunswick, surrounded as we 

 are by forests, the boys are growing up in many of our towns without any 

 knowledge of that sort of thing and cannot identify our commonest trees. 

 Then the study of our chief native woods gives us an interesting set of 

 lessons, as does also the study of our wasted woods, which I consider very 

 important. Only last week I was speaking to our students of an advertise- 

 ment which has been running for some time in an American paper, asking 

 for offers of beech logs. The advertisers cannot get them in their locality, 

 while we are burning many tons every year. Then the properties, character- 

 istics and, therefore, the uses to which the various woods are put, open up a 

 very interesting field. We can take a boy's work bench at school and find 

 that a dozen different kinds of wood have been used in the Construction of 

 that bench and the different tools he has upon it. These different kinds-- d!" 

 wood are not used hap-hazard, but every object is made of some wood that 

 is suitable for it because of the characteristics it possesses. 



Next we deal with the strength of wood ; but it will, of course, be 

 obvious that in a ten or twenty minutes' lesson we cannot go very far into- 

 that subject. We must leave that to the University and higher institutions 

 dealing with it from an engineering point of view ; but we can and do per- 

 fcrm some very interesting experiments dealing with the strength of a piece 

 of wood. 



