284 
TIMBER 
owing to decay, but solely because of the abrasion by rails 
or chairs caused by traffic. 
That there are failures in creosoting is certain. The 
author has seen a creosoted plank taken out of the ground 
in as bad a condition as an adjoining uncreosoted one after 
only a few years' exposure, but this is rare, and on the other 
hand he has cuttings from the Memel timber of the old 
East Pier at Blyth, Northumberland, which has stood the 
wash of the sea and the attacks of the sea worm and 
weather for forty-seven years ; the creosote smells as strong 
as on the day it was injected and still stains the paper 
on which the wood is placed. 
Doubtless one of the reasons of failure in creosoting is 
because the timber treated has not been sufficiently dried. 
Particular care should be taken that logs and planking, 
more particularly the latter, should be properly separated 
by laths when in the creosoting tanks, so that the creosote 
has a proper chance of being injected equally over the 
surface. 
Creosote no doubt, like the salts of metals, tends by 
exposure to weather and salt water to leach out of the tim- 
ber — this may be noticed in telegraph poles during hot 
weather — but, as may be judged from the examples given 
above, it is a very slow process. Cut timber in the same 
situation as piling, and used for bracing, begins to be 
affected by the sea worm at or near low water much sooner 
than vertical piling, and, chiefly at the ends where the 
timber has been cut to fit and the creosote partly cut away, it 
has been attacked after about eighteen years in this country 
and in some instances sooner. The German Government 
give statistics extending over fifty years, from which they 
estimate the average life of creosoted telegraph poles to be 
twenty and a half years, but many telegraph poles in Great 
Britain have been in use for forty years. Of sixty poles 
