242 NUTS AND NUTTING. 



nel of many of tliese nuts is enclosed in a brown 

 or scaly skin, which in the fresh walnut is quite 

 disnc^reeable enough even to man to make it worth 

 while for us to })ecl our walnuts before eating 

 them. Tlie similar inner coat of the almond is 

 familiar to all of us; and we usually look upon it 

 merely as a sort of accidental distigurement, put 

 there in order to be cleared away with liot water 

 befoie the clean wliite almonds are mixed with 

 raisins for our English dessert-tables. In reality, 

 it is there in order to preserve the almond from 

 the little worm whom we sometimes find to our 

 chagrin inside the husk of a damaged specimen. 

 We forgot too often, in our blind human fashion, 

 that the primary })urpose of all these nuts is to 

 serve as seeds for their own trees ; that of serving 

 as food for man and other animals, though no 

 doubt the most important from our own personal 

 point of view, is, after all, in the scheme of Nature, 

 nothing more tlian a secondary and derivative one. 

 Before man was created at all, the earth brought 

 forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, 

 and tlie tree violdinjr fruit, whose seed was in 

 itself, after his kind. Tlie iirst use of the seed is 

 as a seed ; its use as grain or food-stuff is sec- 

 ondary only. 



