Our national Department of Agriculture gathers facts in relation to forestry as well as to farming, and publishes them for the use of any one who wishes them. It has just issued some interesting facts about pine-trees, of the variety from which turpentine is obtained.
"Work in a turpentine orchard is started in the early part of the winter, with the cutting of the boxes. Trees of full growth, according to their circumference, receive from two to four boxes.
"The boxes are cut from eight to twelve inches above the base of the tree, seven inches deep and slanting from the outside to the interior. In the adult trees they are fourteen inches in the greatest diameter, and four inches in the greatest width, with a capacity of about three pints. In the mean time the ground is laid bare around the tree for a breadth of two and a half to three feet, and all combustible material loose on the ground is raked into heaps to be burned, in order to protect the trees from the danger of catching fire during the conflagrations, which are frequently started in the pine forests by design or carelessness. The employment of fire for the protection of turpentine orchards against the same element necessarily involves the total destruction of the smaller tree growth, and if allowed to spread without control beyond the proper limit often carries ruin to the adjoining forests.
"During the early days of spring the turpentine begins to flow, and chipping is begun, as the work of washing the trees is called, by which the surface of the trees above the box is laid bare beyond the youngest layers of the wood to a depth of about an inch from the outside of the bark. The removal of the bark and of the outermost layers of the wood—the "chipping" or "hacking"—is done with a peculiar tool, the "hacker," a strong knife with a curved edge fastened to the end of a handle bearing on its lower end an iron ball of about four pounds in weight, to give increased force to the stroke inflicted upon the tree, and thus to lighten the labor of chipping. As soon as the scarified surface ceases to discharge turpentine freely, fresh incisions are made with the hacker. The chipping is repeated every week from March to October or November, extending generally through a period of thirty-two weeks, and the weight of the chip is increased about one and one-half to two inches every month. The rosin which accumulates in the boxes is dipped into a pail with a flat trowel-shaped dipper, and is then transferred to a barrel for transportation to the still."
Queer Complication of Territory.
Kings and presidents send ambassadors to the capitals of other countries, as you know. The residence of these ambassadors is, in law, not a part of the country in whose capital they are located, but a part of the country from which comes the ambassador residing there at the moment. For instance, the residence of the American Ambassador to France is in Paris, but at law it is not French but United States territory. A novel incident grew out of this legal fiction recently.
The Japanese Embassy in Berlin is not German, but Japan territory, of course. The embassy owns a parrot. The parrot got out of its cage and took lodgement in a neighboring tree—a tree in Germany, not in Japan. A Japanese servant remaining in Japan levelled a hose at the parrot, with the aim of dislodging him. It chanced that beneath the tree there sat, at the time, a German resident of wealth. The water that dislodged the parrot drenched him and ruined his clothes. He sued for damages, and got $4—a compromise sum, because the inflictor of the damage was a resident of Japan, had not left his own country, and could not be dragged into a German police court.