[244] One of these, the Baron of Renfrew—so named from one of the titles of the kings of England—built thirty or forty years ago, measured 5,000 tons. They were little else than rafts, being almost solid masses of timber designed to be taken to pieces and sold as lumber on arriving at their port of destination.
The lumber trade at Quebec is still very large. According to a recent article in the Revue des Deux Mondes, that city exported, in 1860, 30,000,000 cubic feet of squared timber, and 400,000,000 square feet of "planches." The thickness of the boards is not stated, but I believe they are generally cut an inch and a quarter thick for the Quebec trade, and as they shrink somewhat in drying, we may estimate ten square for one cubic foot of boards. This gives a total of 70,000,000 cubic feet. The specific gravity of white pine is .554, and the weight of this quantity of lumber, very little of which is thoroughly seasoned, would exceed a million of tons, even supposing it to consist wholly of wood as light as pine. New Brunswick, too, exports a large amount of lumber.
[245] This name, from the French chantier, which has a wider meaning, is applied in America to temporary huts or habitations erected for the convenience of forest life, or in connection with works of material improvement.
[246] Trees differ much in their power of resisting the action of forest fires. Different woods vary greatly in combustibility, and even when their bark is scarcely scorched, they are, partly in consequence of physiological character, and partly from the greater or less depth at which their roots habitually lie below the surface, very differently affected by running fires. The white pine, Pinus strobus, as it is the most valuable, is also perhaps the most delicate tree of the American forest, while its congener, the Northern pitch pine, Pinus rigida, is less injured by fire than any other tree of that country. I have heard experienced lumbermen maintain that the growth of this pine was even accelerated by a fire brisk enough to destroy all other trees, and I have myself seen it still flourishing after a conflagration which had left not a green leaf but its own in the wood, and actually throwing out fresh foliage, when the old had been quite burnt off and the bark almost converted into charcoal. The wood of the pitch pine is of comparatively little value for the joiner, but it is useful for very many purposes. Its rapidity of growth in even poor soils, its hardihood, and its abundant yield of resinous products, entitle it to much more consideration, as a plantation tree, than it has hitherto received in Europe or America.
[247] Between fifty and sixty years ago, a steep mountain with which I am very familiar, composed of metamorphic rock, and at that time covered with a thick coating of soil and a dense primeval forest, was accidentally burnt over. The fire took place in a very dry season, the slope of the mountain was too rapid to retain much water, and the conflagration was of an extraordinarily fierce character, consuming the wood almost entirely, burning the leaves and combustible portion of the mould, and in many places cracking and disintegrating the rock beneath. The rains of the following autumn carried off much of the remaining soil, and the mountain side was nearly bare of wood for two or three years afterward. At length, a new crop of trees sprang up and grew vigorously, and the mountain is now thickly covered again. But the depth of mould and earth is too small to allow the trees to reach maturity. When they attain to the diameter of about six inches, they uniformly die, and this they will no doubt continue to do until the decay of leaves and wood on the surface, and the decomposition of the subjacent rock, shall have formed, perhaps hundreds of years hence, a stratum of soil thick enough to support a full-grown forest.
[248] The growth of the white pine, on a good soil and in open ground, is rather rapid until it reaches the diameter of a couple of feet, after which it is much slower. The favorite habitat of this tree is light sandy earth. On this soil, and in a dense wood, it requires a century to attain the diameter of a yard. Emerson (Trees of Massachusetts, p. 65), says that a pine of this species, near Paris, "thirty years planted, is eighty feet high, with a diameter of three feet." He also states that ten white pines planted at Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1809 or 1810, exhibited, in the winter of 1841 and 1842, an average of twenty inches diameter at the ground, the two largest measuring, at the height of three feet, four feet eight inches in circumference; and he mentions another pine growing in a rocky swamp, which, at the age of thirty-two years, "gave seven feet in circumference at the but, with a height of sixty-two feet six inches." This latter I suppose to be a seedling, the others transplanted trees, which might have been some years old when placed where they finally grew.
The following case came under my own observation: In 1824, a pine tree, so small that a young lady, with the help of a lad, took it up from the ground and carried it a quarter of a mile, was planted near a house in a town in Vermont. It was occasionally watered, but received no other special treatment. I measured this tree in 1860, and found it, at four feet from the ground, and entirely above the spread of the roots, two feet and four inches in diameter. It could not have been more than three inches through when transplanted, and must have increased its diameter twenty-five inches in thirty-six years.
[249] Williams, History of Vermont, ii, p. 53. Dwight's Travels, iv, p. 21, and iii, p. 36. Emerson, Trees of Massachusetts, p. 61. Parish, Life of President Wheelock, p. 56.
[250] The forest trees of the Northern States do not attain to extreme longevity in the dense woods. Dr. Williams found that none of the huge pines, the age of which he ascertained, exceeded three hundred and fifty or four hundred years, though he quotes a friend who thought he had noticed trees considerably older. The oak lives longer than the pine, and the hemlock spruce is perhaps equally long lived. A tree of this latter species, cut within my knowledge in a thick wood, counted four hundred and eighty-six, or, according to another observer, five hundred annual circles.
Great luxuriance of animal and vegetable production is not commonly accompanied by long duration of the individual. The oldest men are not found in the crowded city; and in the tropics, where life is prolific and precocious, it is also short. The most ancient forest trees of which we have accounts have not been those growing in thick woods, but isolated specimens, with no taller neighbor to intercept the light and heat and air, and no rival to share the nutriment afforded by the soil.