craft trades · economic history · groundtruth
The Proprietors Have Consented
The 1903 Woodsman's Handbook prints a Doyle log table beside a notice that its copyrighted matter was used by consent. Read the same cells in seven printings, run Doyle's rule on each one, and follow only the readings that the rule cannot produce. The record cannot recover a proprietor's name or turn board feet into lumber yield.
A table is a record of decisions made before it reaches a reader. Here the decision is a number in a square: a length down the side, a diameter across the top, and a result that may have been copied, rounded, or slipped. The page keeps the source's headings and units, and labels its modern grouping choices.
default run
Across 16 diagnostic cells, the 1903 Handbook matches plate B at 14, while its record contains one reading that neither Doyle nor plate B supplies.
first layer
Turn the cell over
The books call the axes L. Ft. and Dia.. Choose a declared cell. The rule is the practitioner’s own arithmetic: deduct four inches for slab, take one quarter of what remains, square it, and multiply by log length. The page then puts every transcribed printing beside that result.
Doyle's rule, in the table's units
Read is a cell in the frozen diagnostic extract. Refuse is a cell this extract does not support. A refusal never fills the blank from the formula.
Loading the local record.
20 feet by 10 inches
45 board feet
The rule will appear here.
The printed readings will appear here.
second layer
Which copy reached the government?
The dismissal is right as far as it goes: a correct cell is shared by every correct copy, and matching numbers alone do not make a family tree. The further result starts by setting aside cells the rule can explain. Change the evidence class, the rounding band, the plate grouping, the row domain, the witnesses, or the doubtful reading, then watch the proposed source for W6 change.
Declare the reading before you count
The engine has not run yet.
Shared non-rule readings
A bar joins two selected groups only when they print the same value on a cell the current evidence rule marks as diagnostic. It is a count of shared readings, not proof of descent.
Witness pair check
These direct pairs keep the W2 and W7 mutation check visible. A changed cell must move its pair count.
Which printing did W6 copy?
Each hypothesis is scored on the current diagnostic cell set, and its denominator is the number of compatible target readings still available. W5 is displayed as a control, then refused as a source because its printing is later than the 1903 Handbook. A fresh computation is also a hypothesis, not a fact about the historical compositor.
the permission
The proprietors have consented
The back of the 1903 title page does not name the proprietors. It does say what permission covered. The wording below is transcribed from the page image, including the printed spelling furnised; the page claims no more than the resolution says.
the check
The check
What the engine recomputed
The values below are not typed summaries. They are the current output of engine.js over the frozen local extract. Change a choice above and this panel changes with it.
Published Freese arithmetic anchor
Freese's printed 16-foot Doyle row is a published arithmetic anchor, not a second implementation. The row is not one of the seven collated witnesses, so it tests the production arithmetic only.
as printed loading
computed loading
What this record can and cannot say
This is a fallback diagnostic extract, not a full transcription of seven tables. Nineteen cell coordinates are frozen here. Every included datum has its printed page, Internet Archive leaf, source spelling, two transcription passes, and the selected normalised value beside it. The 1903 and 1910 tables are represented at the cells needed for the provenance result, not as complete books.
- Not a log measurement. The table models a trade's board-foot measure. It does not observe a log, mill recovery, lumber yield, taper, bark, kerf, defects, or money.
- Not a general family tree. A correct cell is not evidence. Only a shared exact-cell deviation or a beyond-rounding reading enters the default descent display.
- Not a Scribner lineage. The Scribner variations were documented rule changes, and this page refuses to treat them as a single reproducible rule.
- Not a Decimal C lineage. The federal Decimal C table is a rounded rule with its own small-log schedules and errors, not this Doyle record.
- Not an International lineage. Its formula leaves a rounding convention unstated, so this page does not infer descent from it.
- Not a proprietor's name. The joint resolution names proprietors collectively but not individually. This page narrows its claim to the cells it read.
- Rights status. The first two Internet Archive records name the Public Domain Mark. The three Canadian records supplied no rights field, so no scans are shipped. The government records carry the institution's belief, while the 1903 table prints a copyright notice.
The historical notices and all page and leaf citations are listed in the research README. No upstream service is queried when this page runs.
The seven witnesses
The declared ranges below are bibliographic ranges. The read blocks are narrower. A witness without a transcribed cell is not silently filled from the rule.
Sources and prior art
- Frank Freese, A Collection of Log Rules, USDA Forest Service General Technical Report FPL 1, anchor page and catalogue record.
- Henry Solon Graves, The Woodsman's Handbook, USDA Bureau of Forestry Bulletin 36, 1903, and Graves and Ziegler, 1910.
- George W. Fisher, Scribner's Lumber and Log Book, revised edition of 1882, and the related printings listed above.
- Harold C. Belyea, “A Postscript on the Lost Identity of Doyle and Scribner”, Journal of Forestry 51(5), 326 to 329, 1953, DOI 10.1093/jof/51.5.326. C. Harold Belyea and Robert T. Sheldon, “Some Anomalies in the Board Foot Measurement of Logs”, Journal of Forestry 36(10), 963 to 969, 1938, DOI 10.1093/jof/36.10.963. The accessible routes did not expose a cell-level collation of the Handbook printings.
The novelty sentence is deliberately bounded: we searched the listed books, the two Belyea records, Internet Archive full text, Crossref and Semantic Scholar records, and the Artificial Wasteland corpus on 2026-09-15 and did not find a cell-level collation of these Doyle printings that states the Handbook carries the Lumber and Log Book's misreadings.
The offline verifier is research/the-proprietors-have-consented/verify-the-proprietors-have-consented.mjs. The licence and extraction record is in LICENCE.txt.