WOODEN PAPER. Once upon a time paper grew on trees, and within the past quarter of a century the world has turned again to the forests as the source of its supply. Thin sheets of the inner bark of birch in America and Europe, and of the paper mulberry in Asiatic countries preserved the crude characters by which primitive peoples expressed themselves. The names—beech, beece, boc, bok, bucb, book—link the past with the present in the races sprung from Teutonic stock. They sent messages from tribe to tribe written in symbols on thin beechen boards—their first written communications. Afterward, the old Scandinavian and Icelandic runes were written on the same sort of wood, and many boards constituted a book. The word "liber," Latin for "book," is the name of the inner bark of trees; in botany the term has always been used. The word "library," therefore, has a long and interesting pedigree.
The reed, papyrus, was harvested for paper in the days of antiquity, along the banks of the river Nile. Thin sheets of the pith of this slender plant formed the books of early Egypt. Libraries of these ancient writings were preserved in the Pyramids. The narrow, thin strips of pith were joined by overlapping their margins and by lining each sheet thus formed with a similar one whose strips were at right angles with the strips of the first one. The two sheets, made one by pressure, formed a page beside which the boards of the beechen books seem very clumsy indeed.
The fibres of cotton, wool, flax, and silk, gathered as rags, cleaned, bleached and shredded, furnished the better qualities of paper in later times. They still do. But such paper is ex pensive. The crude materials cannot be gathered in sufficient quantity to supply the demand for it. Straw, hemp and other grass fibres serve for paper of coarse grades.
To-day, as of old, our paper grows on trees, for nothing has been discovered to substitute for rags; so wooden paper, not so good, but the best thing so far to be had, has come to fill the demand. No longer the Tiber, merely, but the whole bulk of the wood substance is used.
The first manufacturers of paper from wood pulp were the white-faced hornets, whose grey nests are sedulously let alone by the sophisticated roamer of the woods in summer, and often ignorantly, in winter, too, though the citadel is empty and might be taken. The wavy lines of shaded colour, each about an inch long and one-eighth of an inch wide, are mouthfuls of wood fibre gathered from the surface of unpainted posts or rails, or dead limbs weatherworn but not decayed. Chewed into a ball by the tireless wasp, this pulp is skilfully spread and attached to the thin edge of the wall that is building. It dries into tough paper, whose texture and colour vary with the species of wood the insect collects from. Men were slow to learn of the hornet, but they were driven to it. The immense increase in the demand for paper has had to be met. Forests of spruce are raised in Europe like any other crop for the supplying of the paper mills. The trees grow uniform like corn in a field. They are thinned and tended throughout their lives. A certain part of the forests are cut clean each year and the land reset with seedling trees. By the time its turn comes round again, this area has another crop ready for harvest. The limbs even, and the trees taken out by the thinning process, go to the pulp factory.
In America great quantities of spruce and other woods are yearly cut for pulp. A single large New York daily newspaper consumes 180 tons of spruce paper in a single issue. It takes 25o cords of wood to make this much paper. In course of a year this one order will clear i 8,000 acres of spruce timber, as it averages among our Northern mountain forests. When we consider the newspapers and books each day brings forth, the paper used in other ways—the manifold uses to which paper pulp is put beside paper making—we are not surprised that the pulp makers are concerned as to the future sources of the raw materials that feed their mills.