THE PERSIMMON 257 



frosts. Undoubtedly if some attention was given to the selection 

 •of the right varieties, to care of the trees, pruning and grafting of 

 the finer sorts, a profitable industry could be built up, as there is 

 no pleasanter fruit than some persimmons, and none except the 

 date that has a greater food value. 



We have a second species in the United States, less well known 

 because of its more restricted range. This is the black persimmon 

 or chapote, Diospyros texana, found in the river valleys from the 

 Colorado River of Texas to the Neuvo Leon in Mexico. It is a 

 fair sized, intricately branched tree, whose fruits of a black color 

 are often said to be insipid. They lack the astringency so frequent 

 in our common persimmon, and I have found them fully as appetiz- 

 ing as the large Japanese persimmons often grown in our southern 

 States. 



In that grand display of dicotyledonous genera which during 

 the mid-Cretaceous replaced the old Mesozoic flora of ferns, cy- 

 cads, and conifers and which appeared with such apparent sudden- 

 ness at a number of points in the Northern Hemisphere, we find 

 unmistakable evidence of the abundance and wide distribution of 

 species of Diospyros. No less than 17 different forms have been 

 described from the rocks of this age, and the localities where they 

 have been found are scattered from Australia to Bohemia, Green- 

 land, and Vancouver Island. A large majority of these species 

 are American, and they seem to have been especially at home along 

 the Cretaceous coast of the Atlantic and along the border of the 

 Mediterranean Sea which extended northwestward from the Gulf 

 of Mexico over much of our present Great Plains area. One of 

 these species, well named Diospyros primaeva by Professor Heer 

 in 1866, is especially widespread and abundant, being found not 

 only in Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska in the west but also from 

 Texas eastward through Alabama and northward in South Carolina, 

 North Carolina, Maryland, New Jersey, Long Island and Green- 

 land, or, from latitude 33° to latitude 71° north. That these early 

 persimmons were not very different from those of today is shown 

 by their similar foliage, as may be seen from a comparison of the 

 leaf of Diospyros primaeva shown in figure 1 alongside of a small 



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