150 THE NUT CULTURIST. 



and cultivation of forest trees, no special encouragement 

 has been extended to the nut-bearing kinds, and the 

 man who plants a cottonwood or worthless willow is 

 given as much credit as though he planted and reared a 

 tree a thousand times more valuable to himself and the 

 country at large. 



This may not be a very creditable phase of nut cul- 

 ture in the United States, but it is history, nevertheless, 

 and to attempt to suppress it would merely be encour- 

 aging negligence, which has already become so general 

 that the inferior varieties of hickory nuts command a 

 much higher price in our markets than the very choicest 

 did a few years ago. 



The nomenclature of the walnut family has been 

 subjected to various revisions by botanists, during the 

 present century, and there are probably others yet to 

 follow in the near or distant future. In all other stand- 

 ard botanical works published prior to 1817-1818, the 

 hickories were classed with the butternut, black walnut 

 and Persian walnut, and under the generic name of 

 Juglans. But in the year 1818 Mr. Thomas Nuttall, an 

 eminent English botanist, who had given years to wan- 

 dering through our forests and studying American 

 plants, separated the hickories from the older genus of 

 Jitglans, placing them in a new one, to which he gave 

 the name of Carya, from an ancient Greek name of the 

 walnut tree. This classification of Nuttall's was imme- 

 diately adopted by the botanists of his time, and has 

 been observed, scarcely without question, by the authors 

 of all the numerous botanical works published in Amer- 

 ica and Europe during the past seventy-five years. But 

 now we are informed by some of our noted botanists 

 that, in deference to the law of priority dominant in 

 matters scientific, "NuttalPs name for this genus must 

 be abandoned, inasmuch as Mr. C. S. Rafinesque, 

 an erratic Frenchman possessing considerable ability 



