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Show Wood Does Not Decay With Age; Fungus Is Chief Destroyer, Scientists Assert Wood is almost imperishable, will last almost forever provided it is protected against the attack of wood -. destroying fungus, which causes decay, according to the U. S. Forest Products laboratory in Wisconsin. Wis-consin. Timbers in the White House that were used in its construction in 1816 were recently found to be perfectly sound. Houses in New England that were built 300 years ago are still structurally intact. It is said that timbers several hundred hun-dred years old have been recovered from the ruins of Indian pueblos in Arizona, while a part of a Roman emperor's houseboat that sank 2,000 years ago in Lake Nemi was sound enough to be identified by the Forest For-est Products laboratory as spruce wood. Not long ago a log 7 feet in diameter was found in a tunnel being be-ing dug 150 feet below the bed of the Yakima river in Washington. A piece of it was sent to the Forest Products laboratory and the wood was identified as an extinct species of sequoia, of an age estimated by geologists at 12,000,000 years. These examples prove, the U. S. Forest Products laboratory says, that wood does not necessarily decay de-cay with age; that decay is the result re-sult of only one thing, the attack of wood-destroying fungus. In the cases described in the foregoing the wood was protected against fungus attack by either keeping the wood dry or continuously saturated. These facts indicate the possibility of making fence posts last a long time, even if they be of soft wood like elm. Obviously fence posts are not protected against fungus attack, unless treated. It will pay well to treat all fence posts with creosote; but while it will prolong the life of a post to merely dip it in creosote, the most effective way is to heat the liquid so as to increase its penetrating pene-trating qualities. Some farmers accomplish ac-complish this by heating creosote in iron barrels, standing the posts in them and allowing them to "cook" a while. Some woods, like hickory, are destroyed by worms or borers, and in which case, if used for posts, the entire post must be treated, whereas ordinarily only that portion por-tion of the post which is set into the ground is treated. |