The Lumber Industry And Its Workers Classic Reprint PDF Download

Excerpt from The Lumber Industry and Its Workers From the light that science projects into the obscurity of the remote past we have every reason to believe that not only the progress but the very existence of the human race was dependent on timber. The trees provided a refuge for our ape-like ancestors and thus saved them from destruction by the monstrous beasts and reptiles that then inhabited the earth. The first weapon of primitive man was a wooden club. Without wood the discovery of fire, which started man on the road of civilization, would have been impossible. The invention of the wooden bow-and-arrow marks the beginning of another important stage in the advance of the race. In his first rude attempts at agriculture the savage scratched the ground with a pointed stick, which later evolved into the wooden plow. In the early stages of development man lived without agriculture, but it is scarcely conceivable that his existence would ever have been possible without timber. As the race passed from savagery thru barbarism to civilization wood remained essential to its progress. Even today, without wood and the products of wood, civilization in its present form could not exist. In our daily lives we are constantly dependent on wood. We live in wooden houses, sleep in wooden beds or bunks, sit on wooden chairs, eat at wooden tables, use wooden toothpicks and matches, walk on wooden sidewalks, ride in wooden cars, sail in wooden ships, and finally are put in wooden coffins and hauled to the boneyard in wooden hearses. Policemen enforce the law with wooden clubs, and only too often that same law is the product of wooden heads. The newspapers and books we read and the paper on which we write are made from wood pulp. An endless variety of commodities, both solid and liquid, are stored and transported in wooden boxes and barrels. Wood is extensively used as a fuel, and some idea of its value in that capacity may be gained from the following estimate by the Forest Service, United States Department of Agriculture: "In heating value one standard cord of well-seasoned hickory, oak, beech, birch, hard maple, ash, elm, locust or cherry wood is approximately equal to one ton(2,000 pounds) of anthracite coal. However, a cord and a half of soft maple, and two cords of cedar, poplar, or bass wood, required to give the same amount of heat. "One cord of mixed wood, well-seasoned, equals in heating value at least one ton of average grade bituminous coal. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.