If. 1. THE RED OAK. 149 
texture thin and membranaceous; the color of a lively, shining 
green above, paler, but shining beneath. 
The acorns are larger and contained in a broader and shal- 
lower cup, than those of any other northern oak. The cup is 
invested with narrow, thin, and very close scales. The kernel is 
whitish, and bitter to the taste, but the acorns are eagerly sought 
after by cattle and swine, though they seem not to be much in 
request with the smaller wild animals. 
The red oak is of little value for fuel or for most purposes 
as timber. The sour and acrid juices, which can hardly be 
expelled from the wood by natural or artificial seasoning, rapidly 
corrode iron spikes which are driven into it; and the bark 1s 
almost worthless for the use of the tanner. Beams made of it, 
and employed in the frame of buildings, have, indeed, been 
found free from decay at the end of a century: and it is easily 
distinguished, even at that age, from the wood of any other oak, 
by its not having become seasoned, and by its thence imperfect 
combustibility. From having names given it which belong to 
far more valuable species, it has. in many places. a better repu- 
tation than it deserves. It is used, and that only for inferior 
purposes, where no other species of oak can be obtained. 
But, like some individuals in a higher field in creation, it 
compensates in some measure for its comparative uselessness, 
by its great beauty. Noother oak flourishes so readily in every 
situation; no other is of so rapid growth; no other surpasses it 
in beauty of foliage and of trunk; no oak attains, in this cli- 
mate, to more magnificent dimensions; no tree, except the white 
oak, gives us so noble an idea of strength. 
A red oak, in Lancaster, at the foot of George’s Hill, west of 
the north branch of the Nashua, measured. in 1840, seventeen 
feet in circumference, at three feet from the ground, and fourteen 
feet ten inches, at six. A wall prevented its being measured 
at the surface, where it is much larger. It continues very 
large for eighteen or twenty feet, when it divides into four or 
five very large limbs, which spread and form a fine round head. 
I have found many other large trees. 
It is of singularly rapid growth from the stump, the shoots 
rising sometimes to six feet or more in one season. Careful 
