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SPECIES
Various Species FAMILY
N.O. Pinaceae
DESCRIPTION
Pines are among the most important commercial trees. Most of them have straight, un-branched, cylindrical trunks, which furnish large amounts of excellent saw timber. On account of the straight grain, strength, and other qualities of pine timber, it is used for nearly every sort of constructional work and the trade in it is enormous. All the Pines yield resin in greater or smaller quantities, which is obtained by tapping the trees.
The crude resin is almost entirely used for the distillation of Oil of Turpentine and Rosin, only small quantities being employed medicinally - for ointments, plasters, etc. |
When the Oil of Turpentine is entirely distilled off, the residuum is Rosin or Colophony, but when only part of the oil is extracted, the viscous mass remaining is known commercially as common Crude Turpentine.
USES
Oil of Turpentine is a good solvent for many resins, wax, fats, caoutchouc, sulphur, and phosphorus, and is largely employed in making varnish, in oil-painting, etc. Medicinally, it is much employed in both general and veterinary practice as a rubefacient and vesicant, and is valuable as an antiseptic. It is used for horses and cattle internally as a vermifuge, and externally as a stimulant for rheumatic swellings, and for sprains and bruises, and to kill parasites. |
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Resin is used not only by violinists, for rubbing their bows, but also in making sealing wax, varnish, and resinous soaps for sizing paper and papier maché and dressing hemp cordage, but one of its special uses is for making brewer's pitch for coating the insides of beer casks and for distilling resinous oils, when the pitch used by shoemakers is left as residuum. Pitch is also used in veterinary practice.
Tar is an impure turpentine, viscid and brown-black in color, procured by destructive distillation from the roots of various coniferous trees, particularly from Pinus sylvestris. Tar is used medicinally, especially in veterinary practice, for its antiseptic, stimulant, diuretic and diaphoretic action. Tar-water is given to horses with chronic cough and used internally and externally as a cutaneous stimulant and antiseptic in eczema. Oil of Tar is used instead of Oil of Turpentine in the case of mange, etc. Pine resins are largely employed by the soap-maker for the manufacture of brown soaps.
MEDICINAL ACTION
Rubefacient, diuretic, irritant. A valuable remedy in bladder, kidney, and rheumatic affections and diseases of the mucous membrane and respiratory complaints; externally in the form of liniment plasters and inhalants.
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