434 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



through the midst of that perpetual battling competition for the surface 

 of the earth which goes on as fiercely between trees and plants as be- 

 tween men themselves or other animals. To put it briefly in a single 

 phrase, we may say at once that a choke-cherry is one of the kind of 

 fruits which want to be eaten, and sedulously lay themselves out be- 

 forehand for that very particular purpose. 



But, when we turn from the choke-cherry to the hickory-trees which 

 grow close by, we are brought face to face at once with another and 

 very different state of things. If the choke-cherry wants to be eaten, 

 the hickory-nut clearly wants to avoid that unpleasant and destructive 

 predicament. In the first place, its color, instead of being brilliant 

 and attractive, like that of most edible fruits, is very quiet and unob- 

 trusive, being green while the nut still remains among the fresh foliage 

 upon the branches of the tree, and pale brown when it falls upon the 

 dead leaves and dry grasses that cover the damp and moldering ground 

 beneath. If the hickory-nut were a conscious creature which deliber- 

 ately wished to escape notice, these are the precise tactics which it 

 would be likely to adopt for the sake of protection. Then, again, even 

 when its disguise is pierced, and the nut, with its outer husk entire, is 

 spied upon the ground by some hungry animal, it is coated with a very 

 nasty, bitter covering, which effectually repels one from tearing it open 

 readily with the teeth. We hand-wearing human beings, however, 

 may perhaps manage to peel off the outer husk with a knife or stone, 

 or, by more popular practice, to put a lot of the nuts together in a 

 wheat-sack and thrash them out by stamping on them with our feet. 

 Even so, however, we still have the actual woody inner nut-shell itself 

 to deal with ; and unless we have arrived at that highest stage of civ- 

 ilization where nut-crackers are specially manufactured for us, to aid 

 us in the struggle, we must crack them as best we may with our own 

 precious and too unstable molars. But the native enemies of the hick- 

 ory-nut — squirrels and the like — can not proceed in any such crunch- 

 ing and radically destructive fashion. They must bore a hole through 

 the shell somewhere, and then extract the kernel little by little with 

 their long, sharp, curved front teeth ; and, somehow, the arrangement of 

 the nut inside the shell is of such sort as to render this work of gradual 

 excavation as difficult as possible for the aggressive rodent. The ker- 

 nel, instead of being all plain and straightforward, as in the acorn or 

 the chestnut, is divided up and frittered away in little troublesome 

 cricks and corners which seem as if they had been invented on purpose 

 to prevent you from getting a single good bite out of the nut in any 

 part whatsoever. Clearly, the hickory-nut is in all these respects the 

 exact antipodes of the choke-cherry : it doesn't want to get eaten if it 

 can by any means possibly help it. 



This glimpse at the habits and manners of the hickory enables us 

 to give a brief and intelligible answer to the question. What is a nut ? 

 The reply is, a fruit that tries by inconspicuous coloring and hard cov- 



