II. 1. THE OAK. 115 
one or several ovules, only one of which comes to maturity. 
The fruit is a bony or leathery, one-celled nut, partially or 
entirely enclosed inacup. It contains one, two, or three pen- 
dulous seeds. The embryo is large, the cotyledons being the 
halves of the fleshy fruit. The radicle, or future root, is mi- 
nute, situated at the top of the nut, and, in germination, is the 
first to make its appearance.* 
The genera found in Massachusetts, are the oak, the chest- 
nut, the hazel, and the beech. 
Il 1. Tue Oar. Quercus. L. 
“The Unwedgeable and Gnarled Oak.” 
By the Pelasgians, who, before the Greeks, occupied the land 
afterwards so illustrious for the arts and civilization of its in- 
habitants, and by the fathers of our Celtic ancestors, the oak 
was invested with a sacred character. In the oak woods, which 
gave him shelter and food, the Pelasgian believed there dwelt a 
deity, whom, in the awful solitude, he feared and worshipped. 
There were never wanting some to avail themselves of this 
superstition. and from the oak trees of Dodona came an oracular 
voice which was listened to with a faith which accomplished 
its predictions. Still more sacred was the oak to the inhabit- 
ants of Britain and Gaul under the Druids.t The oak groves 
were their temples, and the mistletoe which grew on the oak, an 
object of still greater veneration, was the wand of the druid. 
This, like every other superstition, must have had its origin in 
reason. And for what better foundation need we look, than the 
majesty, the durableness, the beauty, and the many useful pro- 
perties of the oak? 
Among the earliest inhabitants of Europe, with whom most 
of the fruits now used were not indigenous, the acorn was an 
* The cup of the acorn 1s an involucre, formed by the growing together of a 
great number of little bracts; and the acorn is a fruit formed by the adhesion of 
an ovary to the calyx. One of the ovules increases rapidly after its fecundation, 
and renders the others abortive, either by attracting the sap or by obliterating the 
threads of the pistillate cord. 
+ The name druid is supposed to be derived from a Celtic word, drys, which, 
like the corresponding word drus, (dgus), in Greek, signifies oak. 
