Glenda Roquemore, age 7, of Pasadena, Texas, for her question:

What kind of wood do they use to make paper?

The Chances are the wood from which your newspaper is made came from the mighty evergreen trees of the northern forests. Thw wood was sent to a paper mill where it was chipped and chopped to fragments and pounded to pulp. The soupy pulp was flattened and dried to make huge rolls of paper.

Paper is made from fine, stringy threads all matted together. Plants make these fibers to build their stiff limbs and their woody stems. We can Use many kinds of plant fiber to make paper, but some are better than others. The Chinese soaked mulberry leaves and mashed them to pulp. They poured the soupy pulp into a flat sieve to let the water drain away. A layer of matted fibers was left behind and this was pressed into a sheet of paper  but mulberry leaves are scarce.

Some people used the long linen threads of the flax plant to make paper, and some made paper from grasses  but we would have to use most of our farmlands to grow enough flax to make all the paper we use. Today we make almost all of our paper from wood. We need enough to allow 420 pounds of paper for every American each year. And only the big trees can give us all the plant fiber we need.

The tall evergreens are the best for making paper. These furry boughed giants thrive in Canada and in our own northern forests. There the stately Douglas fir grows from l00 to 200 feet tall. Every year hundreds of these and other giant fir trees are cut down and sent to the paper mills. Hundreds of tall pines also are chipped and chopped to make soupy paper pulp.

The fern leafed hemlock is another good paper making tree. Hemlocks are tall, straight evergreens of our eastern and western forests, and some of them grow l00 feet high. Many tall poplars and feathery larches also go to the paper mills.

One of the best paper making trees is the spruce and this may seem a pity  for the spruce is the Christmas tree of the forests. The red spruce, the white spruce and the black spruce look like Christmas trees all their lives. And some spruce of the Northwest may grow l80 feet tall and have a trunk l2 feet thick.

The wood of a mighty tree trunk is made from fibers of cellulose. This cellulose material is very tough and its fibers are pliable. At the paper mill the fibers are segregated and then matted together with gummy glues to hold them together in flat sheets. And the best woods for the job come from evergreens such as spruces and hemlocks, firs and larches.