34 
of its nuts, which now raised in southern orchards of selected varieties 
have become an important article of food and have given rise to a 
large and rapidly increasing industry. Only one species of this group, 
the Bitternut or Pignut {Carya cordiformis) grows at the north. This 
is a fast growing tree often a hundred feet high, with a tall trunk, 
spreading branches which form a broad head, slender branchlets and 
bright yellow winter-buds. The fruit is globose or slightly longer than 
broad, and more or less covered with yellow scurfy scales, and the 
small thin-shelled nut contains a seed covered with a bitter skin which 
protects it even from the nut-hunting boy. One of the interesting 
trees of this group, the Nutmeg Hickory {Carya myrisiicaeformis), is 
a rare and local tree in South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisi- 
ana, southern Arkansas and eastern Texas. It owes its name to the 
oblong red-brown nuts marked by longitudinal bands' of small gray 
spots. From the other species of this group it differs in the thick hard 
shell of the nut, which makes the species intermediate between the 
trees with bud-scales which do not and which do overlap. In the first 
group only the southern Water Hickory {Carya aquatica) has scaly bark. 
An inhabitant of deep river swamps often inundated during a consid- 
erable part of the year from southern Virginia and southern Illinois 
southward, the Water Hickory is a slender tree often a hundred feet 
tall, with nuich compressed, broad-winged, clustered fruits broadest 
above the middle and flat, four-angled, dark red-brown, longitudinally 
wrinkled nuts with intensely bitter seeds. The other species of the 
first group, Carya texana, is a rare’ and local tree of eastern Texas, 
southern Arkansas, and western Mississippi. Popularly called the Bit- 
ter Pecan, it differs chiefly from the real Pecan in its much flattened 
fruit and nut, and intensely bitter seed. 
The trees of the second group differ in the thickness of the branch- 
lets, in their scaly or close bark, in the thickness of the husk of the 
fruit and of the shell of the nut. The most valuable trees of this 
group are the species with bark which separates on old trunks into 
long, broad, loosely attached scales, popularly known as Shellbarks or 
Shagbarks. As a nut tree the most valuable of these, and after the 
Pecan the most valuable nut tree in America, is Carya ovata, a com- 
mon and widely distributed species, ranging with Carya cordiformis 
further north than the other species. This tree is distinguished by its 
leaves with unusually five leaflets, its large globose fruit with a thick 
husk splitting freely to the base, and by its small, white, compressed, 
angled, thin-shelled nut with a comparatively large seed of excellent 
flavor. The Big or Bottom Shellbark {Carya laciniosa) is a taller tree 
often a hundred and twenty feet tall, and an inhabitant of deep, often 
inundated bottom-lands. Rare east of the Appalachian Mountains, it is 
very abundant in the valley of the lower Ohio River and in central 
Missouri. From other Hickories it can be distinguished by the 
orange color of the year-old branchlets and by its large winter-buds 
often an inch long and two-thirds of an inch thick. The leaves are com- 
posed of from four to nine, usually seven, leaflets, and the fruit, which 
is the largest produced by any Hickory-tree, is usually oblong with a 
thick freely splitting husk and more or less compressed, prominently 
