Moreover, her work is done so economically that it used to be much cheaper to use her cargo in Capetown than to utilize the beautiful forests of the Knysna and King Williamstown.
But there are not wanting signs that the forests of Norway, of Sweden, and even those of the United States, are doomed.
It is said that seven acres of primeval forest are cut down to supply the wood which is used up in making the paper required for one day's issue of a certain New York journal. What a responsibility and a source of legitimate pride this must be to the journalists! Let us hope that the end justifies the means.
Boulger calculates that in 1884 all the available timber from 4,131,520 acres of Californian Redwood was used in making the sleepers of the railways then existing in the United States.
He finds that no less than 18,000,000 acres of forest are necessary to keep up the supply of sleepers for the old lines and to build new ones.
So that, if we remember the wood required for paper, firewood, and the thousand other important requisites of civilized man, the United States must soon exhaust her supply and import wood.
Then will come the opportunity of British North America. The Southern forest of Canada, which extended for 2000 miles from the Atlantic to the head of the St. Lawrence, has indeed gone or is disappearing into pulpwood and timber, but there is still the great Northern forest from the Straits of Belleisle to Alaska (4000 miles long and 700 miles broad), and in addition the beautiful forests of Douglas Spruce and other trees in British Columbia covering 285,000 square miles.
It is the wood-pulp industry which is at present destroying the Canadian forests. The penny and halfpenny papers, and indeed most books nowadays, are made of paper produced by disintegrating wood: it is cheap, and can be produced in huge quantities; nevertheless it is disquieting to reflect that probably nineteen-twentieths of the literary output of the twentieth century will be dust and ashes just about the same time (some fifty years) that the writers who produced it reach the same state.[23]
Yet, considering the amount daily produced to-day, the future readers of fifty years hence who are now in their cradles, may consider this a merciful dispensation of Providence.
One very curious use of wood may be mentioned here. Near Assouan, on the First Cataract of the Nile, one discovers broken granite or syenite needles, which had been intended by the ancient Egyptians for monuments. Where the broken pillar lies, there are rows of wedge-shaped holes cut in the rock.