PREFACE. 
A HANDY-BOOK on Home and Foreign Timber, for 
ship and house building purposes, is, in the opinion of 
many, much required. The botanical treatises which 
are accessible are too strictly scientific in their form 
and treatment to interest the general reader, and they 
lack that practical application of knowledge to the 
wants of the shipwright and carpenter, which it is 
one of the aims of this book to give. Hence, I 
have endeavoured to concentrate into one form all 
the information which books and long experience 
could give, and so to arrange the materials as to 
make them intelligible and acceptable alike to the 
master builder and apprentice. 
Keeping this in view, I have introduced into the 
work the substance of a course of lectures on the 
properties of timber, which I delivered at the Royal 
School of Naval Architecture at South Kensington; 
