FLOATING OF TIMBER. 
277 
Another evil, sometimes of serious magnitude, which at¬ 
tends the operations of the lumberman, is the injury to the 
banks of rivers from the practice of floating. I do not here 
allude to rafts, which, being under the control of those who 
navigate them, may be so guided as to avoid damage to the 
shore, but to masts, logs, and other pieces of timber singly 
intrusted to the streams, to be conveyed by their currents to 
sawmill ponds, or to convenient places for collecting them 
into rafts. The lumbermen usually haul the timber to the 
banks of the rivers in the winter, and when the spring floods 
swell the streams and break up the ice, they roll the logs into 
the water, leaving them to float down to their destination. If 
the transporting stream is too small to furnish a sufficient chan¬ 
nel for this rude navigation, it is sometimes dammed up, and 
the timber collected in the pond thus formed above the dam. 
When the pond is full, a sluice is opened, or the dam is blown 
up or otherwise suddenly broken, and the whole mass of lum¬ 
ber above it is hurried down w T ith the rolling flood. Both of 
these modes of proceeding expose the banks of the rivers 
employed as channels of flotation to abrasion,* and in some of 
found in the crowded city; and in the tropics, where life is prolific and 
precocious, it is also short. The most ancient forest trees of which we 
have accounts have not been those growing in thick woods, but isolated 
specimens, with no taller neighbor to intercept the light and heat and air, 
and no rival to share the nutriment afforded by the soil. 
The more rapid growth and greater dimensions of trees standing near 
the boundary of the forest, are matters of familiar observation. “ Long 
experience has shown that trees growing on the confines of the wood may 
be cut at sixty years of age as advantageously as others of the same 
species, reared in the depth of the forest, at a hundred and twenty. We 
have often remarked, in our Alps, that the trunk of trees upon the border 
of a grove is most developed or enlarged upon the outer or open side, 
where the branches extend themselves farthest, while the concentric 
circles of growth are most uniform in those entirely surrounded by other 
trees, or standing entirely alone.”—A. and G. Villa, Becessitco dei Boschi, 
pp. 17, 18. 
* Caimi states that “ a single flotation in the Valtelline in 1839, caused 
damages alleged to amount to more than $800,000, and actually appraised 
at $250,000 .”—Cenni sulla Importanza e Goltura dei Boschi , p. 65. 
