As furniture makers, Chippendale and his contemporaries were masters without any doubt, but they enjoyed one special advantage that can never be replicated: the use of the finest furniture wood that has ever existed, a species of mahogany called Swietenia mahogani. Found only on parts of Cuba and Hispaniola {the island today shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic} in the Caribbean, Swietenia mahogani has never been matched for richness, elegance, and utility. Such was the demand for it that it was entirely used up-irremediably extinct-within just fifty years of its discovery.
( Bill Bryson )
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