Fishes and crustaceans, or lobster-like creatures, crawled and squattered through the slime, pursued by salamander-like animals with weak limbs and a long tail. Some of these latter were seven to eight feet long. Millipedes, scorpions, beetles and maybugs existed, and huge dragonflies preyed on them.
But there is one very ancient group of trees, the Araucarias or Monkey-puzzles, which are by no means uncommon even now. The ordinary one (Araucaria imbricata) is often planted in the British Isles, and it has, if you look closely at it, a most peculiar appearance. It is like the sort of tree that a child would draw; it is a clumsy attempt at one, and very different from the exquisite irregularity of the ash or oak.
Its leaves are especially curious: they cover the branches very closely, and are hard, rigid, and spiny. Its cones, though of the nature of pine-cones, are yet quite unique. The seeds are edible, and used to be an important article of diet to the Indians on the slopes of the Chilian Andes, where monkey-puzzle forests used to exist. This of course is a very out-of-the-way region; other species of Araucaria are found scattered about the world in a most perplexing manner. One kind grows in Norfolk Island, in the Pacific; another occurs in the inner mountainous districts of Brazil; there are some in Australia and others in New Caledonia.
But in the Jurassic period of geology, in the age of ammonites and gigantic lizards and crocodiles, Araucarias were the regular, ordinary trees. They grew all over Europe, and apparently as far north as Greenland, and, indeed, seem to have existed everywhere.
Perhaps the spiny leaves discouraged some huge lizard, perhaps Atlantosaurus himself (he was thirty feet high and one hundred feet long), from browsing on its branches. Perhaps the Pterodactyls, those extraordinary bird or bat-like lizards, used to feed upon the seeds of the monkey-puzzle, and carried them in their toothed jaws to New Caledonia, Australia, and Norfolk Island. Other improved types have driven the monkey-puzzles from Europe, Asia, and Africa, and taken their places, but in out-of-the-way districts of South America and Australia they are still able to hold their own.
An ally of theirs, the Ginkgo or Maidenhair tree, seems to have been extremely common in certain geological periods. To-day it has almost entirely disappeared. A few trees were discovered in certain Chinese temples, where they had been preserved as curiosities for centuries, but it is almost extinct as a wild plant. The Bigtree group (Sequoia p. 47) was a companion of the Ginkgo in its flourishing period. So also were the Sago palms or Cycads. All the ordinary trees, Pines, Oaks, Beeches, and the like, did not appear upon the earth's surface till a much later period.
The most important economic product of trees is the timber which they furnish. Wood, as we have tried to show in the last chapter, has been always of the greatest importance to mankind. It is easily worked, durable, buoyant, and light, and it is used for all sorts of purposes.
Silver fir,21 which is accustomed, when growing, to be continually swayed and balanced by the wind, is preferred for the sounding-board of pianos and for the flat part of violins, whilst Sycamore or hard Maple is employed for the back and sides of the latter.
But there are enormous differences in different kinds of woods. The colour of wood varies from white (Beech), yellow (Satinwood), lemon-yellow and bluish red (sap and heartwood of Barberry), to dark and light brown mottled (Olive), black (Persimmon), and dark brown (Walnut). Some woods have a distinct smell or perfume. Cedarwood, Sandalwood, Deal, and Teak, are all distinctly fragrant. The Stinkwood of South Africa and the Til of Madeira have an unpleasant smell.
More important in practice are the differences in the hardness and weight of wood. The Ironwood of India cannot be worked, as its hardness blunts every tool. It requires a pressure of something like 16,000 lb. to force a square-inch punch to a depth of one-twentieth of an inch in Lignum vitæ. Even Hickory and Oak (if of good quality) require a pressure of 3200 lb. to the square inch to do this. On the other hand the Cotton tree of India (Bombax malabaricum) has exceedingly soft wood. It is quite easy to drive a pin into the wood with the fingers.
Some woods are far too heavy to float: many tropical woods are especially very weighty. Perhaps the Black Ironwood, of which a cubic foot weighs 85 lb., is the heaviest of all. But the same volume of Poplar, Willow, or Spruce does not weigh more than 24 lb.
There are many ancient and modern instances of the extraordinary way in which timber lasts when at all carefully looked after. Thus the Cedar which "Hiram rafted down" to make the temple of Solomon (probably Cedar of Lebanon) seems to have been extraordinarily durable. Pliny says that the beams of the temple of Apollo at Utica were sound 1200 years after they were erected.
Cypress wood (Cupressus sempervirens) was often used to make chests for clothes because the clothes moth cannot penetrate it, and it also lasts a very long time. There is a chest of this wood in the South Kensington Museum which is 600-700 years old. The Cypresswood gates of Constantinople were eleven centuries old when they were destroyed by the Turks in 1453. The fleet of Alexander the Great, and the bridge over the Euphrates built by Semiramis, were made of Cypress. This wood seems to have been of extraordinary value to the ancients, and was used for mummy cases in Egypt, for coffins by the Popes, as well as for harps and organ pipes.22
Perhaps the most valuable woods are Box, which is used for woodcuts, and Walnut, which used to be highly prized for gun-stocks, as much as £600 having been paid for a single tree.
But the most interesting histories of trade in timber belong to the commoner and more usual woods. The great woods of Jarrah (Eucalyptus marginata) cover 14,000 square miles of Australia, but they are being rapidly cut down and sawn up into small blocks to be carried right across the world in order to form the pavement which London cabmen and cab-horses prefer to any other.
One remembers also the beautiful Deodar forests of Afghanistan, and the Himalayas. Logs of deodar were floated down the rivers to form bridges or temple pillars in Srinagar, the capital of far Cashmere. Nowadays great "slides" are made, winding down into the valleys from the recesses of the hills. When winter approaches, water is sprinkled on the logs which make the slide; this freezes and forms a slippery descending surface, down which the deodar timber rushes till it reaches the low ground, where it is cut up into railway sleepers and takes part in the civilizing of India.
The fragrant Teak has an oleoresin which prevents the destructive white ants from attacking it; it is the most valuable timber for shipbuilding, and grows in many places of India, Malaysia, Java, and Sumatra. It floats down the rivers of Burmah, coming from the most remote hill jungles, and elephants are commonly used at the ports to gather the trunks from the water and pile them ready for shipment.
The Birch is carried all the way from Russia to Assam and Ceylon, in order to make the chests in which tea is sent to England and Russia (native Indian woods are also used). It is also used in the distillation of Scotch whisky, for smoking herrings and hams, for clogs, baskets, tanning, dyeing, cordage, and even for making bread.
But one of the most curious and interesting sights in any seaport is sure to be an old white Norwegian or Swedish sailing barque or brigantine. She will have a battered, storm-beaten appearance, and is yet obviously a comfortable home. The windows of the deck-house may be picked out with a lurid green. The tall, slowmoving, white-bearded skipper and his wife, children, and crew, not to speak of a dog and cats, have their home on this veteran "windjammer." She carries them from some unpronounceable,