I.{erry Christrnas to Everybod>.

(Continued from Page 12) with a baseball bat made of formaldehyde and phenol ! This is quite a market in itself ; bats and other spbrting goods use up about 30,000,000 feet of lumber annually. Oicourse. substitutes will easily and cheaply give us yeirly a million telegraph and telephone poles, billions of crosi-arms and insulator pins and a billion fence posts.

Doubtless the resinoids and composites will serve admirably for airplane fuselages and propellors; patterns ancl flasks for iron and other castings, themselves requiring a small forest each year; shoe pegs and other shoe hndings; tanks, silos and rollers, trunks and valises,; miscellaneous !tql4!.r, laking a big forest yearly, agricultural implements, 300,000,000 feit ; boat building -200-,000,000; rrood..,*"r", twice as much; fixtures, interior trim, sash, doors, blinds, mouldings and planing mill products in general; brooms, firearms, dowels, picture frames, coffins,- musical instruments (nothing but rvood for sounding boards) ; pulleys, pumps,. sewing machines, shuttles, spools and bobbins, signs, tobacco boxes, packing boxes and crates, chairs and other furniture, machines, and so on through the 4,500 uses of wood.

Every manufacturing industrv in the world depencls to some extent upon wood. Truly the resinoids will start something when they undertake to substitute for them.

Let it not be forgotten that synthesis and composition do not work in a vacuum and rvith nothing. The exhaustionof coal, the prolific source of synthesis, is already in sight in Europe, American anthracite has a relatively brief span ofduration. E,ven our soft coal and building sands have certain, though distant limits. Brick clay deposits are being worked out every year. Cement clays are not everywhere, W" are assured at this moment of only six 3rears' supply of petroleum in the United States, forty years of copper and trventy to thirty years of the best iron-oie.

Th-e _whirlpool of industrial and commercial change may yet deflect an enormous volume of demand to lumbir; the world may eagerly return to the material that can be produced forever without exhaustion, a material that is simply a usable physical form of elements that eventually return to their disunited condition. Eternally produitible wood, instead of being the target of substitution, may become the universal substitute to piece out the dwindling supplies of non-replaceable inorganic materials.

By-Products of Lumber

But the synthesists tell us that rvood is already too diar, no matter rvhat its qualities, to be used in its natural composition, subject to no change but drying and shaping, i. e., t9 say, in general, lumber. They eliminate lumbei but they demand trees for fibre, distillates and cellulose. Thev mujt have them for material for svnthesis. Here is wheie thev get ahead of themselves. There is too much ready-mad; wood in the rvorld.

-The physical waste in producing lumber, and quantities of low grade or cull lumber for rvhich no profitable market has been found, is enough to make annually all the pulp and paper the United States rvill consume for twenty-five years to come. Low grade luntber is too cheap to pay for taking defective or inferior logs out of the forest. Chemical utilization of cellulose is usually economically possible only because of the material available as an incident of lumber manufacture. In some forests 5,000 to 15,000 board feet of potential lumlter or cellulose are left to rot on the groundLumbermen are praving for the wonder workers of chemistry to shorv them some profitable use for this material.

Ancl 1,st, already, we have instances of secondary materials, made from rvood and in great vogue, that are sometimes costlier and frequently poorer than nature's un-

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