Vast as are the forests of the United States, Americans are finding out that they are not inexhaustible. The annual product of ‘lumber,’ which means timber in all its forms, is estimated at ten thousand million feet, a quantity sufficient to make a perceptible gap in the broadest of forests. Among the heaviest items of consumption are the railways with their eighty thousand miles of sleepers, to say nothing of ties, bridges, platforms, and fences. The average ‘life’ of the wood when laid in the ground is from four to six years; and each year’s renewal is said to use up one-sixth of the enormous product above mentioned. These facts have led some thinking constructors to reconsider the national objection to precautions, and they now advocate the use of preserved timber, and have invented a method of preservation. The principal part of the apparatus is a large air-tight iron cylinder one hundred feet long, into which the wood is run on rails; all the openings are closed; steam at a high temperature is forced in, and the process is maintained until every part of the wood is heated up to two hundred and twelve degrees. The steam is then driven from the cylinder; heat is applied; then a vacuum is produced, and ‘many barrels of sap’ pour from the wood. Creosote oil is then forced into the cylinder. ‘Every stick is at once bathed with oil. The wood, being in a soft somewhat spongy condition, the fibres porous, and the pores open, absorbs at once the hot penetrating oil. If the wood be of a porous character like pine, it absorbs all the oil required in the first flow without any pressure; but if the fibre be solid and close and the timber of a large size, a further pressure of from sixty to one hundred and fifty pounds is needed to make the impregnation complete.’ This process reminds us of one on a somewhat similar principle which was noticed in this _Journal_ for November 25, 1876. In an address to the Royal Geological Society of Ireland, Sir Robert Kane remarked on the activity prevailing among the geologists and chemists of that country in investigation of their mineral resources. The search for fluorine in rocks has had favourable results; and the discovery of phosphoric acid is regarded as an indication of the extent to which organic remains were included originally in those mineral masses. Certain beds described by geologists as lower Silurian and Cambrian, destitute of fossils, nevertheless contain such traces of phosphorus as shew that they must have been formed in seas rich in organic life. These facts, as Sir R. Kane shewed, are of special interest in Ireland, where, owing to the rareness of those newer formations which furnish the valuable coprolite beds of Cambridge and Suffolk, such sources of agricultural wealth are absent; but where the older strata being so largely developed offer resources for discovery of accumulated organic remains which may be turned to good account in fertilising the soil.