CHAPTER XIV 



BOTANICAL CLASSIFICATION AND VABIETIES 

 OF THE PECAN 



The pecan is a hickory, one of the Juglandacese or Walnut 

 family. A half dozen genera comprise the family, of which 

 the walnut and the hickories are represented in North Amer- 

 ica, the other genera being Asian and one Central American. 

 With the exception of a recently discovered species in China, 

 all the hickories are native from Canada to the highlands of 

 Mexico. Seventeen species are now recognized. 



At first the hickories were included in the genus Juglans, 

 with walnuts. Linnaus, the founder of modern botanical 

 nomenclature, included three species of Juglans in his 

 ''Species Plantarum, '' 1753, — the historic Old World walnut. 

 Juglans regia, the American black walnut, J. nigray and one 

 of the hickories, /. alha. He did not know the pecan. In 1785 

 Humphrey Marshall, in his work on American trees, recog- 

 nized the pecan and named it Juglans Pecan; and as Pecan 

 is the first specific botanical name to be regularly applied to 

 the plant it must hold in whatever genus the hickories may 

 subsequently be placed. The pecan was published as Juglans 

 illinoensis by Wangenheim in 1787, as /. angustifolia by 

 Alton in 1789, and as /. cylindrica by Poiret in 1797. These 

 names are now synonyms, but they are worth record as indi- 

 cating interesting stages in the technical recognition of the 

 pecan as a distinct species (see page 16). 



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