362 Canadian Record of Science, 



when dry. The bark is useful to the Indian for the 

 making of his canoe ; the vessel for retaining the sap of 

 the maple ; his drinking cup and the cover of his wigwam. 

 The yellow birch provides a cough remedy by boiling the 

 sap down to a syrup ; and, lastly, though not least, it 

 furnishes the proverbial birch-rod, which, though almost 

 obsolete, sometimes does good service, even in these days 

 of advanced ideas. Vast quantities of the dwarf or black 

 birch have been used as withes in rafting logs, some 

 concerns using as many as thirty or forty thousand in a 

 season, each of them representing a young tree ; lout little 

 of this is clone at present. 



We now come to what every lumberman considers the 

 king of the forest, in grandeur, usefulness and value, the 

 white or cork pine, or piniis strobus of the scientists, the 

 tree of all others that serves more purposes than we can 

 enumerate. Among them the tiny match, the mast for 

 the great ship, the frame of the sweet sounding piano, and 

 wherever a soft, easy-working wood is wanted, either in 

 the arts, the workshop, or the factory, there it is to be 

 found. As an article of commerce, it far surpasses in 

 value and quantity any other wood, if not all sorts put 

 together. It supplies more freight for vessels coming into 

 the St. Lawrence than any other commodity ; it gives 

 more employment to wage-earning men than any industry 

 in our country, except agriculture. It employs more 

 capital in manipulating it from the time the men leave 

 for the woods in the fall, to make, haul and drive the logs 

 and timber to the mills — the building of mills for sawing, 

 the construction of barges and steamboats to convey it to 

 market, as well as the large amount of freight furnished 

 to railroads, the erection of factories to convert it to the 

 various uses to which it is put. It is safe to say, that the 

 A^alue of the output of pine lumber alone, produced in 

 Canada, is at least $25,000,000, or two and a half times as 

 much as that of any other manufacturing industry ; and, 



