"But doesn't it take a lot of wood to make a little paper?" asked the boy. "There's been such a howl about paper-pulp that I thought it must be fearfully wasteful."
"It isn't wasteful at all," was the reply. "A cord and a half of spruce will make a ton of pulp. Where the outcry comes in is the quantity used. One newspaper uses a hundred and fifty tons of paper a day. That means two hundred and twenty-five cords of wood. The stand of spruce here is about ten cords to the acre. So one newspaper would clean off ten acres a day or three thousand acres a year."
"But wouldn't it ruin the forest to take it off at that rate?"
"Certainly," the Supervisor answered, "but the sale will be so arranged that not more will be sold each year than will be good for the forest."
"Is all paper made of spruce?" asked Wilbur.
"No. Many kinds of wood will make paper. Carolina poplar and tulip wood are both satisfactory."
"Except for the branches and knot-wood," said Wilbur, "almost every part of every kind of tree is good for something."
"And you can use those, too," came the instant reply. "That's what dry distillation is for. All that you've got to do is fill a retort with wood and put a furnace under it, and all pine tree leavings can be transformed into tar and acetic acid, from which they can make vinegar, as well as wood alcohol and charcoal."
Finding that the boy was thoroughly interested in the possibilities of lumber, the Supervisor, usually so silent and brief in manner, opened out a little and talked for two straight hours to Wilbur on the possibilities of forestry. He showed the value of turpentine and resin in the pine trees and advocated the planting of hemlock trees and oak trees for their bark, as used in the tanning industry.
As the Forester warmed up to his subject, Wilbur thought he was listening to an "Arabian Nights" fairy tale. Despite his customary silence Merritt was an enthusiast, and believed that forestry was the "chief end of man." He assured the boy that twenty different species of tree of immense value could be acclimatized in North America which are of great commercial value now in South America; he compared the climate in the valleys of the lower Mississippi with those of the Ganges, and named tree after tree, most of them entirely unknown to Wilbur, which would be of high value in the warm, swampy bottoms. And when Wilbur ventured to express doubt, he was confronted with the example of the eucalyptus, commonly called gum tree, once a native of Australia, now becoming an important American tree.