Black ash fills many important places in the country’s wood-using industries, but the total quantity is not large. In 1910 Michigan manufacturers reported the annual quantity in that state at 9,110,432 feet, and in Illinois the total was 9,936,000 feet. The uses for the wood in Michigan may be regarded as typical of the whole country. The reported uses were, auto seats, baskets, boat finish, butter tubs, candy pails, carriage seats, crating, church pews, fish nets, office fixtures, flooring, furniture, ice chests, interior finish, jelly buckets, kitchen cabinets, lard tubs, piano frames, putty kegs, racked hoops, spice kegs, tin plate boxes, veneer, washboards, and woven splint boxes. Black ash burls are characteristic excrescences on the trunk. They begin as small lumps or knobs under the bark, and never cease growing while the tree lives. They may reach the dimensions of wash tubs, but most do not exceed the size of a gallon measure. The grain of the wood is exceedingly distorted and involved. The burls are sliced or sawed in veneers which are much prized by cabinet makers. Early New Englanders made bowls of them, which seldom checked or split during generations of service. The burls are believed to be due to adventitious buds; that is, buds which originate deep in the wood, but are never able to force their way through the bark. The internal structure of the ash burl indicates that the buried bud grows, branches, and sends shoots in various directions, but all of them are hopelessly enmeshed in the wood substance, and never are able to free themselves and burst through the bark. A constantly enlarging excrescence is the result. BLUE ASH (_Fraxinus quadrangulata_) is named from a blue dye procured from the inner bark. The botanical name relates to the square shape of the young twigs, particularly the twigs of young trees, and was given by A. F. Michaux who found the species growing in the South. It reaches its best development on the lower Wabash river in Indiana and Illinois and on the Big Smoky mountains in Tennessee. Its northern limit reaches southern Michigan, its western is in Missouri. It is not abundant, if found at all, east of the Appalachian mountains. Trees may reach a height of 100 feet and a diameter of three, but about seventy is the average height, with a diameter of two feet or less. The leaves resemble those of black ash in form, but the foliage when seen in mass is yellow-green instead of dark green like that of black ash. The seeds look like those of black ash. The tree bears perfect flowers, and in that respect differs from most other species of ash.