LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY GREENE 35 



kinds Black Walnut and White Walnut respectively; also that 

 this naming of the kinds was made not in reference to any morpholo- 

 gical characters of the trees, but to that of the colors of the wood; 

 this having been done quite after the manner of self-taught wood- 

 men, whereas school-taught botanists would have assigned names 

 suggested by organographic marks. But this all relates to nothing 

 else but the making of specific distinctions and the assigning of 

 specific names. When we ask ourselves by what marks they were 

 able to refer these new trees to the genus of the walnuts, we obtain 

 but the answer that it was by those of their fruits; these in such 

 degree resembling that of the one kind of walnut before known to 

 them as to warrant the conclusion that the trees were of the walnut 

 kind, as they would have expressed it, rather than of the oak or 

 chestnut kind. 



But our colonists' experiences with the native American oaks, if 

 they had been more fully recorded than they were, would have 

 been still more interesting. As English woodsmen only one kind of 

 oak can have been well known to them. In Virginia they can not 

 have failed to meet at once with about a half-dozen sorts, most of 

 them in aspect exceedingly unlike the English Oak; so much so 

 that they can not reasonab y be supposed to have identified them 

 with that genus of trees at all until after close inspection. One of 

 the sorts displayed to them the foliage of the chestnut tree, another 

 that of the laurel, still another the leaves of a willow. The chest- 

 nut-leaved kind had not at all the bark nor the wood of chestnut 

 trees, but of oaks, rather; therefore these first observers of the tree 

 would hardly have needed to appeal to the fruits in order to satisfy 

 themselves that this new tree was but an oak, merely imitating the 

 chestnut as to its foliage. But among the other kinds, such as had 

 neither foliage nor bark nor wood in any way answering their idea 

 of an oak tree, they can not have determined to be oaks by any 

 other note in each but that of its fruit. 



That which I have thus far hypothecated concerning early Vir- 

 ginian colonists in relation to native Virginian oaks is demonstrable 

 as something more than even the most rational of hypotheses. 

 There is documentary evidence of the historic truthfulness of all, 

 and more than all, that I have here but intimated as probable. That 

 these men, forced by circumstance to make trial of the timber of 

 trees new to them, did early recognize as oaks certain kinds most 

 unlike what they had known as oaks, in all except their fruits, 

 is attested by a colonial list of names of new American oaks which 

 was published when the colony was but two generations old. I re- 



