Page:Timber and Timber Trees, Native and Foreign.djvu/60

 CHAPTER VII.

EXPERIMENTS ON TIMBER.

treated of the principal defects to which timber trees are liable during their growth—and perhaps they are all that need be now considered, as others of a less important character will be noticed later on, whenever they affect any particular class of wood—I will pass for the present to the description in detail of the various timber trees, observing, by-the-way, that the tables appended are the results of experiments made transversely, tensilely, and vertically on specimens taken from the wood of the tree described. In some cases these are very numerous, and will be, I consider, invaluable, as showing the range and variation of the strength and specific gravities of each wood ; further, they include some rare, and at present scarcely known, species of timber, which may at a future day be in request in this country for building purposes.

It need scarcely be stated here, since it will be well understood, that to classify and collect the notes in order to record these tests of strength, &c., in timber, it has taken a very long time, and, but for the exceptional opportunities I had during a long course of service in the royal dockyards and elsewhere, it would have been impossible for me to have obtained these results. While employed surveying timber for the Navy in New Zealand, and subsequently in India, Belgium,