SOME INTERESTING MINOR INDUSTRIES "Top stuff" in European forests is cut and bound in neat bundles of fagots. Even small twigs are utilised as fuel. In the Southern pineries a similar industry has cut "fat pine" into small kindling wood for use in Northern cities.
Brushwood is used in the construction of earthworks and jetties to keep the channels of rivers narrow and deep. The lower course of the Mississippi has been improved by sinking out from shore latticework of limbs bound together. These sink, become loaded with silt, and act as a barrier to prevent the crumbling of the banks. The force of great waves, striking a latticework of branches, is broken into innumerable harmless ripples. Jetties are much cheaper to build than retaining walls.
The great wickerware industry of Europe, now beginning to establish itself in this country, consumes only the year's growth on certain supple varieties of willow.
Young growth of white birch that springs up in low ground in New England is being consumed in quantities by spool factories and manufactories of toys and other small wares. The trees are used when scarcely larger than cornstalks in some of these factories.
Christmas trees for cities of the East strip hundreds of acres of young hemlock and balsam firs each year. In the South young longleaf pines are shipped North, and hollies and magnolias of all sizes are cut and stripped of their branches for Christmas decoration.
In all this we see that the lumberman has left behind much forest wealth, and people are learning to gather up the refuse and turn it to account. The small sawmill is having its day in many wooded regions of the country, making money in ways which the big mill overlooked. There is much good stuff in slabs, albeit sap wood is less sound and harder to season than heart wood. Lath and shingles can be got out of logs unfit for first class boards. Tops of trees contain posts, stakes and hop and bean poles. There is no better firewood than limbs from one to two inches in diameter. Fuel which consumes much crooked hardwood-stuff yields at last one of the best of fertilisers.
Tanbark comes from many oaks and from hemlock in this country. Chestnut and the black oaks are richest in tannin.
The tanbark oak of California is exceptionally rich, and its ex termination by peelers is inevitable unless protective measures are adopted soon. The same may be said of hemlock in many
regions, though hemlock has a much more extensive range. In sections of Pennsylvania and New England hillsides are covered with peeled hemlocks of all ages, the trees being destroyed for their bark alone.
There are many tropical trees and other plants that yield tannin. Quebracho wood, a South American tree, is the source of tannin extract that is imported by American tanneries to a considerable extent. Our native black mangrove or blackwood, on the Florida coast and neighbouring keys and in the delta of the Mississipi, is a valuable source of tannin, though it grows in inaccessible swamps, full of fever and other dangers.
The method of getting out hemlock bark is described in the chapter: "A Lumber Camp of To-day." Among the products of native trees the nuts are important. Their food value is coming to be appreciated at home and abroad. The hickories include the pecan and two shagbarks, both nuts of commercial importance. Walnuts and chestnuts are secondary. Beech and acorn mast fatten hogs and furnish a living to in numerable birds and wild game, as also do berries, plums and other tree fruits. Flowers of locust and basswood, plum and cherry pasture honey bees. So do many trees of less conspicuous inflorescence.
Gums of balsam fir and other conifers, sweet gum and wax myrtle, berries of buckthorns, wild cherry and holly, roots of sassafras, twigs of witch hazel, all yield drugs. Our Southern silva furnishes valuable dyewoods. Sugar from the sap of maples forms an important and delicious food product.
In the Old World and in the tropics are trees whose great value to the human race is suggested by the mere mention of their names. The cinchona tree yields quinine from its ,Bark. The juice of certain trees hardens into rubber. Para, the Brazilian seaport, is the great distributor of rubber to the world, and the silvas of the Amazon the great producers. Lacquer varnish is the juice of a sumach in Japan. Nutmeg and mace and cloves and allspice grow on trees in tropical countries. The palms feed, clothe and house people.
It is an endless story—the useful products of trees, cultivated and growing wild on the earth. The tropical woods are full of undiscovered possibilities. Our own rich forest flora has but begun to show its value to man.