CHAPTER VIII. 



THE WALlfUT. 



Juglans. The ancient Latin name, first used by 

 Pliny, contracted from Jovis glans, the nut of Jove or 

 Jupiter. A genus of about eight species, three or four 

 of these indigenous to the United States. 



Order, Juglandacem (Walnut family). — Medium to 

 large deciduous trees 'vvith odd-pinnate leayes ; leaflets 

 from fifteen to twenty-one, serrate, mainly oblong and 

 pointed. The sexes of flowers separate (moncecious) on 

 tbe same tree, the males in pendulous green cylindrical 

 catkins two to three inches long, solitary or in pairs, 

 sessile, — not stalked, as in tlie hickories, — issuing from 

 the one-year-old twigs, and at the upper edge of the scar 

 left by the falling leaf of the previous season (Pig. 73), 

 showing that the male organs emanate from an aggrega- 

 tion of bud-cells in the axils of the leaves during the 

 preceding summer and autumn. Female flowers ter- 

 minal on the new growth in spring, also single, in clus- 

 ters, and occasionally in long pendulous racemes with a 

 four-cleft calyx, four minute petals and two thick curved 

 stigmas. Fruit round or oblong (Fig. 74) ; husk thin, 

 drying up without opening by seams, as in the hickories. 

 Shell of nut either rough and deeply corrugated, with 

 sharp-pointed ridges, or quite smooth, with an undulat- 

 ing, wavy surface, very thick in some species and thin 

 in others ; kernel two- or indistinctly four-lobed, united 

 at the apex, fleshy, rich and oily. 



History. — The common walnutj so long and 

 widely known in commerce under various names, such 



203 



