28o Next to the Ground 



transparent brown skin. It is sweetish, with 

 a^^little rough tang at the last. Squirrels and 

 hogs eat it greedily — children even do not 

 despise it. Growing, the acorns are pale- 

 green, the cups bright brown. At ripeness 

 the acorns darken, and the cups lighten to a 

 fine fawn-gray. 



Oak galls are curious things, coming it is 

 said from the stinging of an unfolding leaf 

 by a peculiar oak-gall insect. The white 

 oak is almost solitary in that it bears two 

 distinguishable sorts of galls. One is round 

 and fuzzy, as big as a guinea egg, white with 

 red flecks all over, solid, partly edible and 

 sweetish-sour to the taste. It grows at the 

 end of a young shoot, with no sign of a leaf 

 anywhere about. This is also the habit of 

 the " devil-thumb," the gall of the black-jack. 

 The devil-thumb is smooth, deep-green, coni- 

 cal, sharply pointed, and borne most plenti- 

 fully by the shoots springing up around a 

 black-jack stump. The fuzzy white oak 

 galls are also most numerous upon such 

 second growth. The smooth ones, which 

 are about the size of a big marble, form 

 underneath perfect leaves high in the top of 

 the tree, and are seldom discovered until the 

 leaves fall. 



Description and habit fit exactly the post- 

 oak gall. In every other point the two trees 



