Abstract
THIS handbook is intended for forestry students who are engaged in a course of microscopical work on a selected group of timbers, comprising 24 European, 26 Indian, and 7 American broad-leaved trees, and 14 genera of conifers. The methods of preparing sections and microphotographs for the elucidation of structural details are carefully explained, as well as illustrated by 165 figures in the text. The lack of a comprehensive key to the whole of the genera is regrettable. The genera Salix and Populus, for example, are not distinguished in p. 73. It was scarcely worth while reprinting on p. 35 Hartig's inadequate key of forty years ago. An effort should be made in the next book that is published on the identification of timbers, to combine in one table the various keys that have been published of late years, notably Kawai's diagnosis of 200 species of Japanese broad-leaved woods and Kanehira's elaborate tables of 386 species of Formosan woods and 100 species of the more important Indian woods. Koehler's identification of North American woods, which appeared at Washington in 1917, might also be consulted. Without some such general view of -the distinguishing characters of numerous species of woods, the palseobotanist, the archaeologist, the timber merchant and the furniture dealer are put to great inconvenience in determining with accuracy unknown specimens of woods. This handbook, nevertheless, may be recommended to students who are interested in the structure of timbers.
Timbers: their Structure and Identification.
W. S.
Jones
By. Pp. xi + 148. (Oxford: Clarendon Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1924.) 15s. net.
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Timbers: their Structure and Identification . Nature 115, 601 (1925). https://doi.org/10.1038/115601c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/115601c0