1 88 THE NEW FORESTRY. 



shaken tree is said by timber merchants to be " shaken like a 

 besom," and where ring-shake is known to exist to a serious 

 extent the timber cannot be sold standing, as the shakes 

 cannot be seen till the tree is felled. This disease, or whatever 

 it may be called, is much dreaded, and is, we believe, worse in 

 Scotland than in England, and in thin, exposed woods, the 

 probable reason of which will be shortly explained. The 

 extent of the losses sustained by ring-shake in oak woods may 

 be gathered from a report of a sale of timber on the Haystoun 

 estate, near Peebles, which appeared in the " Scottish Farmer " 

 of November 5th, 1898, and which states that: — Oaks have 

 become almost an impossibility on the Haystoun estate on 

 account of the prevalence of "ring-shake." A considerable 

 number of what would otherwise have been valuable timber 

 trees were seen to be badly affected, and are thus reduced to 

 very little over firewood value. 



In " star-shake " the cracks radiate from the centre to the 

 outside of the stem, or nearly so, but in shakes produced by 

 frost the cracks extend inwards from the outside, always 

 leaving a seam in the bark where it has healed over. These 

 outside cracks are well known to be due to frost, and so 

 probably are those found radiating from the centre. Both 

 ring-shake and star-shake may be found in the same tree, and 

 when that is the case the tree is perfectly useless except for 

 firewood. 



As regards ring-shake, the following case, which came 

 under our own observation, points strongly to frost and expo- 

 sure, from sudden over-thinning at mature age, as the cause of 

 the evil. In 1868, a heavy fall of oak timber was taken out 

 of a fairly dense wood, which was also well furnished with tall 

 underwood that was sold at the same time. The timber was 

 sold standing, and was sound when felled, there being very few 

 shaken trees in the lot About twenty-five years later another 

 fall was bought by the same purchaser, from the same ground, 

 and so many of the trees were ring-shaken as to cause serious 

 disappointment .to both vendor and buyer, the latter having 

 felt confident that the trees would fall as sound as before. 

 The only explanation of this we can think of is that the 

 removal of the underwood and the thinning, in the first fall of 

 1868, deprived the trees of the shelter they had been accus- 

 tomed to and permitted the cold and frost to reach the trunks. 

 Owing to rabbits and the dense crop of bracken that had 

 overspread the wood before 1868, the underwood never grew 

 up again, and its removal, together with the thinning of the 



