We have heard that some of our fortifications which have been erected within the last few years to protect our English coast from invasion, have already been invaded by dry rot. If this be true, some one well acquainted with the subject should at once be appointed to find out the cause, and recommend the remedy in each case.
Professional men, if they wish their works to “live for ever,” should consider the after consequences of neglecting to provide against dry rot. If the fungi could speak from under floors, ceiled-up roofs, behind wainscots, girders, &c., we should often hear them exclaim, “A nice moist piece of wood! Surely this belongs to us.” On the beams of a building at Crawley, a carpenter many years ago cut a few words; they are full of meaning in connection with our subject, and they run as follows:
“Man of weal, beware; beware before of what cometh behind.”
CHAPTER III.
FELLING TIMBER.
The end to be attained in the management of timber trees is to produce from a given number the largest possible amount of sound and durable woods. When a tree, under conditions favourable to its growth, ceases increasing the diameter of its trunk, and loses its foliage earlier in the autumn than it is wont to do, and when the top of the tree brings forth no leaves in spring, these facts may be considered as indications of decline, and that the tree is of sufficient age to be felled. The state of the upper branches of a tree may be considered to be amongst the best indications of its soundness, and provided they be in a healthy condition, the withering of the lower branches is a matter of comparatively small importance.
Trees may be considered as tall, middle rank, and low, and the size to which they will attain depends on many different circumstances. Some trees, the stems of which are short on the average, as the lime, are virtually of tall growth, from the manner in which a number of vertical branches of large size ascend from the stem. And other trees, again, whose branches are comparatively short, are of tall growth, in consequence of the length of the stems—like the beech.
The average duration of trees differs, as is well known, in different species, and they exhibit different symptoms of decay. There are oaks in Windsor Great Park, certainly nearly one thousand years old, and which exhibit even now no appearance of approaching the end of their life. Mr. Menzies, the surveyor, in his work on Windsor Great Park, describes some of the indications of incipient decay which are peculiar to the several kinds of trees. “When a beech begins to fail,” he says, “fungi appear either at the roots or on the forks, the leaves curl up as if they had been scorched, and the tree quickly perishes. In an elm, a great limb first fails, while the rest of the tree continues green and vigorous, but in a few years the whole tree suddenly dies. Coniferous trees die gradually, but quickly. The oak shows the first symptoms at the points of its highest branches, while the rest of the tree will remain healthy and sound for years.” This peculiarity of the oak did not escape the eye of Shakespere, that universal observer, who describes the monarch of the woods as not only having its boughs mossed with age, but its
“High top bald with dry antiquity.”