HICKORY-NUTS AND BUTTERNUTS. 439 



ite pastures it grows abundantly. It flowers above-ground, enticing 

 the bees to fertilize its long, white, tubular blossoms by a copious store 

 of pure and fragrant honey ; but as soon as its wee pods have been 

 fairly impregnated with pollen from a neighboring head, it screws 

 its stalk down spirally into the ground, by the aid of some queer little 

 corkscrew gimlets developed near the tip, and so buries the precious 

 seeds well out of all danger from the close-nibbling teeth of its 

 dreaded foes upon the sheep-walk. 



Last of all, a few words must be said about the structural homolo- 

 gies of the hickory-nut. In principle, most fruits consist of three 

 separate coats or layers, inclosing the seed or seeds. These three lay- 

 ers are very well seen in the peach, which consists, first, of an external 

 skin ; next, of a fleshy edible portion ; and, finally, a hard inner cover- 

 ing — the stone — which contains the actual seed, or, as we oftener call 

 it in practical language, the kernel. Now, in the hickory-nut, these 

 three layers are still preserved, though in a very different apparent 

 fonn : the outer surface, or membrane of the rind, answers to the skin 

 of the peach ; the bitter and stringy interior of the rind answers to 

 the edible part of the peach ; the nut-shell, or inner hard layer, answers 

 to the stone of the peach ; and the nut, or actual seed, answers to the 

 kernel of the peach. This example shows very well by what slight 

 changes in the development of various parts a fruit may seem to prac- 

 tical human eyes quite unlike some other one, which is, nevertheless, 

 at bottom, layer for layer, absolutely identical with it. The only im- 

 portant difference, after all, between the peach and the hickory-nut is, 

 that in the fruit the middle layer becomes soft, sweet, and succulent ; 

 while in the nut it becomes stringy, bitter, and nauseating. The 

 almond even better enforces this simple evolutionary lesson ; for it is, 

 in reality, nothing more or less than a very dry and stringy peach — a 

 very slightly divergent descendant of the same ancestor : its outer- 

 most layer answers exactly to the peach-skin ; its tough, fibrous rind 

 is the. altered analogue of the flesh in the peach ; and its nut (which 

 part alone, shelled or unshelled, we generally see at table) is the 

 equivalent of the peach-stone. But if you cut open a young walnut, 

 a young hickory-nut, a young almond, a young peach, and a young 

 plum, you will be surprised to find how exactly they answer to one 

 another, part for part, and how entirely the conspicuous adaptive dif- 

 ferences in the mature nuts or fruits are due to small varieties of de- 

 velopment in the very latest stages of the ripening process. Pour a 

 little sweet juice into the middle coat of the almond, and it would be 

 a peach ; add a little woody material to the cell-walls of the flesh in 

 the peach, and it would be a very decent almond indeed. 



