THE AMERICAN SYSTEM OF (iATIIERINO TURPENTINE. 



95 



length of the summer season and the way the resin runs. x\t each 

 chipping about one-half an inch of wood is cut off. The resin 

 lying in the resin ducts or pores, which are parallel with the 

 grain of the wood, flows out when these ducts are cut and runs 

 down into the box. The object of repeated chipping is to open 

 a fresh surface for the exudation, when the ducts have become 

 clogged by an accumulation in them of hardened resin. By the 

 end of the first season the face has been carried up eighteen to 

 twenty four inches above the box. 



The resin which runs into the box, called virgin dip the first 

 season, and the yelloiu dip of subsequent years is a thick, viscid 

 liquid, more or less transparent and tliinner the first season, but 

 hardening quickly on exposure. During the first season it is 

 removed seven or eight times from the box. That resin which 

 hardens on the face is removed by a sharp scraper (scraping) and is 

 mixed with chips and bark, and, besides containing only one-half 

 as much spirits of turpentine as the dip, makes a much harder and 

 darker and withal less valuable grade of rosin than the dip, much 

 of the spirits of the scrape having evaporated or oxidized under 

 the influence of light, heat and air. Each year as the face is car- 

 ried up higher, about twenty inches a year, there is more scrape 

 and less dip, as the resin exuding from the freshly hacked sur- 

 face has to run over the entire surface which has already been 

 hacked before it reaches the box, and a large proportion of it 

 hardens and never reaches the box. 



The dip, as has been explained, becomes, in succeeding years, 

 gradually darker as work is carried on until it makes only a slightly 

 better rosin than the scrape and contains only two-thirds as much 

 spirits of turpentine as the virgin dip gotten the first year the 

 boxes were worked. There will average two such boxes to a tree, 

 the trees generally being about twenty inches in diameter. After 

 the ''faces" have been carried up so high that it is no longer 

 profitable to work them, the trees are allowed to rest for several 

 years and recuperate. During this time the sound wood left 

 between the "faces" broadens, partly covering the old faces, so that 

 on large trees new "boxes" can be cut in between the old ones and 



