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PRACTICAL ARBORICULTURE 61 
HISTORY WRITTEN IN A TREE TRUNK—A WHITE ASH STORY. 
On New Year’s Day, A. D. 1906, there was standing on a side track of 
the Cincinnati, Hamilton and Dayton Railway, a flat car which was laden 
with ten white ash logs, a small remnant of the great forests for which Indiana 
was once noted. 
The logs were knotty and badly decayed at the heart, except the one 
which attracted my attention. 
A dozen years ago these logs would not have been looked at by any saw- 
mill operator, but now “anything goes’”—mill men are glad to buy even such 
culls as these. 
The larger log was thirty inches in diameter and had grown to this size 
in 118 years, the seed having started into growth in the spring of 1787. Its 
average annual diameter increase was slightly less than one-fourth inch. 
Had conditions been as favorable during its entire life as they were during 
the middle period, this tree would have been five feet diameter, instead of 
thirty inches. But we anticipate. 
The annual growth, as shown by the concentric rings at the end of the log, 
during the first thirty-two years of this tree’s life was almost imperceptible, 
the lines being but one-thirty-second part of an inch apart. Each year it had 
added one-sixteenth inch to its diameter. 
Evidently its struggle for existence during this third of a century must 
have been very severe, crowded among 2,722 other infantile ash and other 
trees, each striving to secure its share of the quart of water which fell as rain 
or snow on a square foot surface during an entire week of the growing season, 
as that water contained in solution those elements of fertility necessary for 
existence, of even a slow-going tree, it having gathered up this matter while 
percolating through the few inches depth of soil which the roots of this ash had 
appropriated. For it is known that even the most voracious members of the 
vegetable kingdom may partake of that food only which has been dissolved 
by water. 
Resins, gums, varnish, rubber and even camphor may be the product of 
the sap of various trees which supply these particular substances, and while 
we are unable to redissolve these articles except with alcohol or other power- 
ful solvents, yet the trees cannot exist if not supplied with water. 
It took this struggling ash a third of a century to reach a height of twen- 
ty-five feet and a diameter of two inches. 
But at this period of its existence, in the year of 1819, a large majority of 
