Excerpt from A Guide to the Identification, of Our More Useful Timbers: Being a Manual for the Use of Students of ForestryThis guide aims at giving information on certain points which are not easily accessible elsewhere or have hitherto been treated in a manner unsuitable to our purpose. It is therefore assumed that the reader has sufficient knowledge of the elementary structure of wood, to follow the descriptions. Two objects are kept in View: firstly the observation of the characters of the different species, and secondly the utilization of those characters to discriminate between one species and another.No so-called specific gravities are given, since those so far recorded are taken either from long series of well-worked species which have so wide a range as to be quite useless for comparison (for instance between 045 and 090 for the Scots Fir), or from short series of less familiar woods (say 0-70 and O7 the latter, in spite of appearing to vary but little, may average the same as the former. Hence the rather vague terms heavy, moderately heavy, and so on are used, since at least they do not mislead.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.