Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/519

Rh the weather, rain and sun and storm, and wears as well outdoors as inside.

Here is the place to state that, until recently, architects, builders, and engineers had a prejudice against using pine timber that had been bled of its sap for turpentine. They claimed that the bleeding process weakened the tensile strength of the timber. This was disputed, of course, in the South. In order to settle this important question, as the yellow pine lumber industry had grown to enormous proportions, the National Bureau of Forestry undertook a series of careful tests three or four years ago. It was shown by experiments that the sap comes from the sapwood, leaving the heartwood unaffected, and hence the prejudice against bled timber is not founded in fact or reason; in other words, after the pine wood has been tapped, its tensile strength, according to these tests, remains equal to that of virgin growth.

The value of the naval stores produced in the United States is about ten million dollars per annum. Nine tenths of all the naval stores used in the world come from the pineries of the Southern States. The other one tenth is furnished principally by the forests of France and Austria.

The most careful figures of the total production of naval stores in the United States are those gathered by the special agent of the Division of Forestry for the year 1890. They show the total production of these stores to be three hundred and forty thousand casks, or seventeen million gallons of spirits of turpentine, and one million four hundred and ninety thousand barrels of resin of different grades.

In order to produce this amount of naval stores it is estimated that about two million three hundred thousand acres are being worked, and that about eight hundred thousand acres of virgin forest are invaded every year to supply the turpentine stills. At this rate it will not be many years before the effects of reckless cutting, sapping of timber, and fires will be felt in the long-leaf pine belt. As a matter of fact, there has been a steady decline in the production of naval stores during the past ten years in every Southern State except Georgia, and there the increase has been due to the opening of new tracts of timber made accessible to shipping points and markets by railroads.

There is no doubt that the American process of bleeding the pine trees is crude and wasteful, and that the turpentine workers, like the lumbermen, conduct their operations on what has been bluntly termed "the robbing system." What else is it but robbing, when the turpentine operators strip the land of its forest resources, and leave only desolate wastes? It is now time that our turpentine workers introduced better methods and necessary changes in their business.