6o 



a period of eighty years on the best sandy loam 

 soil, in the climatic stronghold of the Douglas fir 

 (that is, the coast of the State of Washington). 

 Macoun i {l.c. p. 134) mentions several places 

 which have turned out 3,000 f.m. per hectare in 

 which trunks of less than o"6 metres and over 

 I '6 metres diameter were not used, which means 

 that the trees were undoubtedly, several hundred 

 years old. The earliest comparative investiga- 

 tions with reference to the wood grown in 

 Germany were undertaken by Mayr, who, in 

 1884, compared the oldest example (at that time) 

 in Germany, raised on the estate of John Booth, 

 Kleinflottbeck, to the American wood. The 

 German wood had the same reddish heart as the 

 American, and displayed, with the increasing 

 annual width of ring, an increasing specific gravity 

 which was confirmed fifteen years later by other 

 investigators (Cieslar, Hartig). Mayr occupied 

 himself simply about the weight which he, as a 

 disciple of Hartig, assumed at that time to be the 

 very alpha and omega in point of quality of the 

 wood. After his investigations Mayr came to 

 the conclusion that the timber of the Douglas fir, 

 even from the poorest quality (that is, weight) is 

 better than fir and pine timber and as regards its 

 best qualities (weight) is quite equal to larch. 



' "Report of the Canadian Forestry Association in 1901," 

 p. 10. 



