Professor Playfair, who visited this singular work, states, that six minutes was the usual time occupied in the descent of a tree; but that in wet weather, it reached the lake in three minutes. He found it quite impossible to give two successive strokes of his stick to any, even the largest tree, as it passed him. The logs entered the lake with such force, that many of them seemed to penetrate its waters to the very bottom. Much of the timber of Mount Pilatus was thus brought to market; but the expense attending the process rendered it impossible for the speculator to undersell the Baltic merchant, when peace had opened a market for his timber, and so the Slide of Alpnach fell to ruin. Cutting the Norway Deals. When the timber is squared before it is exported, it is effected by saw-mills; the manner of proceeding may be illustrated by the treatment of Norway deals. In some cases, the trees are merely roughly-shaped with the axe; but those which are to be made into deals are floated down the mountain-streams to a spot where many collect together, and where a saw-mill is erected. Dr. Clarke thus speaks of one that he visited:--“The remarkable situation of the sawing-mills, by the different cataracts, are among the most extraordinary sights a traveller meets with. The mill here was as rude and picturesque an object as it is possible to imagine; it was built with the unplaned trunks of large fir-trees, as if brought down and heaped together by the force of the river. The saws are fixed in sets parallel to each other, the spaces between them in each set being adapted to the intended thickness for the planks. A whole tree is thus divided into planks, by a simultaneous operation, in the same time that a single plank would be cut by one of the saws. We found that ten planks, each ten feet in length, were sawed in five minutes, one set of saws working through two feet of timber in a single minute.” The deals are afterwards transported by river or canal to seaports. The Cutting and Transport of Canadian Timber. The conveyance of timber to market in Canada is a very remarkable instance of commercial enterprise. While standing in the vast pine forests the timber-trees are common property: they acquire money-value only when the axe has been applied to them, and when they have been brought down to a shipping port.