Wood shrinks in a direction opposite the grain.

No law of nature is more important when it comes to distinguishing genuine antique furniture from reproductions. Here's two other things you should know:

• Soft-wood, like pine or tulip poplar, shrinks faster, and to a greater degree, than hard-wood, like mahogany or walnut.

•  Freshly cut wood shrinks much faster than old dry wood. Now that you know these important facts, here's five ways to employ them.

1.  Next time you go to an outdoor antique show and see sunlight eking through the backboards of a setback hutch or cupboard, take a closer look. Backboards are often made up of planks, with the grain running up and down. The wood, therefore, should be shrunken horizontally, leaving gaps in between. This is good. The same principle applies to a multiple board table top like an old farm table. If there no sunlight eking through the boards, it may be that they were overlapped with tongue-and-groove or ship-lap joints that will still show shrinkage with closer inspection. The other possibility is that it is cloudy out.

2.   On your next visit to a quality antique auction, take a tape measure with you. When you see dealers measuring circular top candlestands and tea tables, know that they are doing so, not be because they are preoccupied by the top's dimension, but by shrinkage and it's clue to authenticity. You will notice that the across-grain measurement of an old table will be anywhere from 3/8 to 5/8 of an inch less in diameter at this point than at a point 90 to it. A freshly cut modern table top will not normally show this variation in diameter.

3.  Look for "cracked" boards. I remember a richly appointed lady who gasped in our antique shop upon seeing a high priced chest of drawers with a shrinkage crack running down the side. She gave me a look that said she was a wealthy woman who would not do business with a man selling a chest with a crack in it. I did not inform her that a wide plank secured on both sides with dovetails and wood pins will always develop a small crack over a long period of time. Instead, I escorted her to every case piece in our shop and proudly pointed out they all had small cracks in their sides. Then, I opened drawers and demonstrated that in the wide plank pine drawer bottoms had also developed gaps. Next, I pointed out that a mahogany tea table and several of our candlestands had small cracks in their tops as well. Before I could explain my point, the woman fled the shop as if she had unintentionally entered a men's bathroom, and never returned.

4.  Use calipers to measure lathe-turned wood. Measure one section, then turn the calipers 90. You will discover that on legitimate early antiques, turned legs and table standards and bed posts are almost never perfectly round. Contraction takes place across the grain making them slightly oval in cross section.

5.  Look for slightly overhanging "breadboard" ends. To prevent a tabletop or slant front desk lid from warping, cabinetmakers often attached long narrow boards to each end. Because the respective woodgrains always intersect at a right angle, old desk lids and table tops will shrink within the once equal boundaries of their breadboard ends. Using the same principle, a close inspection of the top of most early table legs, with unshrinking grain running up and down, will show that they extend slightly beyond their horizontally grained frames.

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