Oak boards and planks that show prominently a good silver-grain figure are spoken of as wainscot stuff. The term is not now, as was formerly the case, restricted to the oak brought from any particular country. Russian wainscot, Austrian wainscot, English wainscot, and American wainscot are the principal kinds now in the market. Russian wainscot oak is brought over in Hitches, as shown in Fig. 1, Austrian stuff principally in plank form. English wainscot also is mostly in plank, and American rift-sawed or quarter-sawed oak, as it is called, in plank and in board. To obtain the figure it is necessary that the faces of the planks and boards coincide, as near as may be, with the direction of the medullary rays; the more nearly they do this, the higher the class of wainscot produced. Fig. 2 shows the ideal system of wainscot cutting, where each board in the log is made to fall exactly on the lines of the medullary rays. This method of cutting is expensive, and necessarily involves much waste of material. In America, where the production of good wainscot stuff is now receiving special attention, the modified system shown in Fig. 3 appears to be most popular. The figure in the outer boards of each group is obviously not so good as it is in the centre ones. When the divergence between the line of the ray and the face of the board is greater than 15° (see Fig. 3) the figure begins to be poor, and in most American ports such material would be graded as " Below Class III." It could hardly be described as wainscot.

Fig. 4.

Fig. 3. Fig. I. Wainscot Oak.