EUROPEAN TIMBER 
39 
when finished. The wood is Hke the best of hard pine, 
both in appearance, quahty, and uses. The heartwood is 
reddish brown with yeUow sap, it is very resinous, and in 
Siberia, after fires, the scorched trunks of the trees yield a 
gum similar to gum arable, known as Orenburg gum. 
Some kinds of larch give a yellowish white cross-grained 
and knotty wood, but it is generally of reddish brown 
colour and has a straight grain, and is more free from 
knots than spruce. Used for fencing posts and palings, 
field gates, scaffold poles, and occasionally in Great Britain 
for telegraph poles and railway sleepers ; also for floors, 
stairs, and positions where there is much wear, and in ship 
and boat building, being light, tough, and lasting. A fence 
of larch from twenty-five year old trees is said to last from 
seventeen to twenty years. Great quantities were used for 
piling and building work in Venice and other Italian cities 
in past centuries, and many noted Italian pictures by the 
old masters have been painted on panels of larch. It will 
not absorb creosote so readily as pine. 
Weight up to 40 lbs. per cubic foot, the white variety 
being much the lighter. Larch is the source of the Venice 
turpentine of commerce. 
English Oak, of which there are two or three varieties 
distinguished by botanists, the stalk-fruited or common 
oak {Quercus peduncidata), Fig. 9, and the cluster-fruited, 
sessile, or bay oak {Q. sessiliflora) . The durmast oak, which 
is found in the New Forest, would appear to be only a 
variety of the Q. sessilijiora. 
The two first named are the prevailing oaks of Northern 
Europe, although the common oak is the more plentiful in 
Great Britain, France, and Germany, and its finest develop- 
ment is found in Hungary. It grows as far south as 
Central Spain. 
