when withdrawn, in October of the same year, the preparation was found to be powerless as a protection against the teredo.
5. Oil of Paraffine.—The firm of Haages & Co., at Amsterdam delivered to the commission some pieces of oak and red fir injected with a substance produced by the dry distillation of peat, to which they gave the name of oil of paraffine. In the month of July, 1860, the commission placed at Stavoren and Nieuwe-Diep ten pieces thus prepared. They were examined in the course of the same year, after they had passed one summer in the water, and it was found that they had resisted the attacks of the teredo.
The commission conducted all its experiments thus: They placed in the water ten pieces of each variety of wood, treated according to the prescribed method, so that they could withdraw each year, during ten consecutive years, one of the pieces to be submitted to examination. In making the examination, they removed with an adze the outside of the wood to a depth of some millimetres, which was sufficient to show the galleries of the teredos, if there were any. The pieces found intact were replaced in the water, and the following year their condition was tested in the same way, by removing the shavings as before. By this plan the commission felt certain that, if the blocks were not injured by the teredo during several successive years, they did not owe that protection to a superficial covering, but that the wood itself resisted the destructive efforts of the teredo, and that there would be no reason for fearing that piles, prepared in a similar manner, would, at any time, lose their power of resistance, when injured on their surface by water or ice, or by slow dissolution of the active principle of the preservative substance.
When the pieces of wood treated with oil of paraffine were taken from the water in 1862, after a sojourn of more than two years, or rather during three summers, traces of the teredo were found in the pieces of oak, but not on those of red fir; but when examined in November, 1863, fully-developed teredos were found everywhere, in the fir as well as in the oak, in the pieces whose surfaces had been removed by the adze, but not more than in those which had not been submitted to any examination.
6. Oil of Creosote.—This is, as is very well known, a product of the dry distillation of coal-tar, separated by distillation from the more volatile parts, which serve for the preparation of benzole and naphtha, the residuum being pitch. Experiments had already been tried abroad, as well as in Holland, with this substance, and from the beginning of their experiments the commission paid especial attention to this very important method of preparation.
Wood of various kinds, prepared with creosote-oil at the works of the Society for the Preparation and Preservation of Wood, at Amsterdam, was placed in the sea. in the month of May, 1859, at Flessingue, Harlingen, and Stavoren. In the month of September following, at
