PREFACE.
A Handy-Book on Home and Foreign Timber, for ship and house building purposes, is, in the opinion of many, much required. The botanical treatises which are accessible are too strictly scientific in their form and treatment to interest the general reader, and they lack that practical application of knowledge to the wants of the shipwright and carpenter, which it is one of the aims of this book to give. Hence, I have endeavoured to concentrate into one form all the information which books and long experience could give, and so to arrange the materials as to make them intelligible and acceptable alike to the master builder and apprentice.
Keeping this in view, I have introduced into the work the substance of a course of lectures on the properties of timber, which I delivered at the Royal School of Naval Architecture at South Kensington;
