Lavinia determined to learn scaling; it was useless to say that you had five hundred logs with an average diameter of thirty-seven inches. How many feet of inch-thick boards would come out of that log? How did you allow for the bark, for the saw kerf, for the taper of the log? She wanted to learn the mathematics of scaling. She knew there were log rules that took all of these variances into account and let the scaler make at least an estimate of the number of boards in a single tree.
