Jot-T 24, 1908] 



SCIENCE 



119 



d, that the secretary of the state of 

 Oiiio transmit immediately upon the passage of 

 this resolution a copy thereof to the Senate and 

 the House of Representatives of the United 

 States, and to each of the representatives of Ohio 

 therein. 



A PRELIMLNAEY report of the consumption 

 of pulp wood and the amount of pulp manu- 

 factured last year has jiist been issued by the 

 Bureau of the Census. The advance state- 

 ment is made from the statistics collected by 

 the Census Bureau in cooperation with the 

 United States Forest Service. Many of the 

 figures bring out interesting facts which show 

 the rapid growth of the paper-making and 

 allied industries during the last decade. 

 Nearly four miUion cords of wood, in exact 

 numbers 3,962,660 cords, were used in the 

 United States in the manufacture of paper 

 pulp last year, just twice as much as was used 

 in 1899, the first year for which detailed fig- 

 ures were available. More than two and one 

 half million tons of pulp were produced. The 

 pulp mills used 300,000 more cords of wood in 

 1907 than in the previous year. The amount 

 of spruce used was 68 per cent, of the total 

 consumption of pulp wood, or 2,700,000 cords. 

 The increased price of spruce has turned the 

 attention of paper manufacturers to a number 

 of other woods, hemlock ranking next, with 

 576,000 cords, or 14 per cent, of the total con- 

 sumption. More than 9 per cent, was poplar, 

 and the remainder consisted of relatively small 

 amounts of pine, cottonwood, balsam and other 

 woods. There was a marked increase last 

 year in the importation of spruce, which has 

 always been the most popular wood for pulp. 

 For a number of years pulp manufacturers of 

 this country have been heavily importing 

 spruce from Canada, since the available sup- 

 ply of this wood in the north-central and New 

 England states, where most of the pulp mills 

 are located, is not equal to the demand. Fig- 

 ures show that the amount of this valuable 

 pulp wood brought into this country was more 

 than two and one half times as great in 1907 

 as in 1889. In 1907 the importations were 

 larger than ever before, being 25 per cent, 

 greater than in 1906. The spruce imports 

 last year amounted to more than one third of 



the consumption of spruce pulp wood. Only 

 a slightly greater amount of domestic spruce 

 was used than in 1906. Large quantities of 

 hemlock were used by the Wisconsin pulp 

 mills, and the report shows that the Beaver 

 State now ranks third in pulp production. 

 New York and Maine ranking first and sec- 

 ond, respectively. Poplar has been used for a 

 long time in the manufacture of high-grade 

 paper, but the supply of this wood is limited 

 and the consumption of it has not increased 

 rapidly. Wood pulp is usually made by either 

 one of two general processes, mechanical or 

 chemical. In the mechanical process the 

 wood, after being cut into suitable sizes and 

 barked, is held against revolving grindstones 

 in a stream of water and thus reduced to 

 pulp. In the chemical process the barked 

 wood is reduced' to chips and cooked in large 

 digesters with chemicals which destroy the 

 cementing material of the fibers and leave 

 practically pure cellulose. This is then 

 washed and screened to render it suitable for 

 paper making. The chemicals ordinarily used 

 are either bisulphite of lime or caustic soda. 

 A little over half of the pulp manufactured 

 last year was made by the sulphite process, 

 and about one third by the mechanical proc- 

 ess, the remainder being produced by the soda 

 process. Much of the mechanical pulp, or 

 ground wood, as it is commonly called, is used 

 in the making of newspaper. It is never used 

 alone in making white paper, but always mixed 

 with some sulphite fiber to give the paper 

 strength. A cord of wood ordinarily yields 

 about one ton of mechanical pulp or about 

 one half ton of chemical pulp. 



Professor H. W. Conn, of Wesleyan Uni- 

 versity, has sent to the press the manuscript 

 of a new bulletin of the State Geological Sur- 

 vey, " The Algse of the Fresh Waters of Con- 

 necticut," as a companion to a previous bulle- 

 tin, "The Protozoa of the Fresh Waters of 

 Connecticut." Professor Conn was assisted 

 in the work by Mrs. L. H. Webster, a 

 former graduate student. The bulletin con- 

 tains over 300 illustrations by the two authors 

 and Harold J. Conn (Wesleyan 1908), son of 

 Professor Conn. 



