—_——$_— 
794 
John; and it is reported by Bradley to have had 
in his day a girth of 51 feet at two yards from 
the ground, and by Sir Robert Atkins to have 
had a girth of 57 feet. Mr. Marshall, however, 
both denies the accuracy of these measurements 
of it, and asserts it to be, not one tree, but two 
trees. Brydone, during his tour through Sicily, 
measured the remnants of a celebrated chestnut- 
tree, standing at the foot of Mount Attna, and 
called Castagne de Cento Cavilla, and found them 
to have a girth of 204 feet! 
Coppices of common chestnut are of compara- 
tively great value, affording an excellent produce 
every ten or twelve years for hop-poles, hoops, 
and all kinds of yelastic props and handles. 
Chestnut underwood in a favourable climate and 
on good soil, rarely fails to yield fair profit; and 
lines and belts of young chestnuts for shelter 
| combine their immediate advantage with a large 
amount of final utility. The wood of young 
chestnuts serves better for gate-posts or for any 
other purpose which involves constant contact 
with the ground, than any other kind of wood 
_ except yew and larch. Older chestnut timber is 
| preferable to elm as a substitute for oak, and has 
_ sometimes been lauded as a good succedaneum 
_ for the coarser kinds of mahogany in the making 
of furniture. 
For some uses, particularly for 
door-jambs, window-frames, and several other 
objects of house-carpentry, it is nearly equal to 
oak ; but for beams, rafters, and other objects 
_ destined to bear great loads of variable weight, 
it has a certain deceitful brittleness which ren- 
ders it quite unfit, and occasionally not a little 
dangerous. \Cask staves of chestnut possess the 
_ double recommendation of not being liable to 
shrink, and of not imparting a foreign colour to 
liquors which the casks may contain. 
The nuts of the Spanish chestnut-tree, as grown 
in Britain, seldom attain any tolerable degree of 
perfection. Some nurserymen have introduced 
| early and prime varieties from the south of Eu- 
rope, and have subjected them to the most pow- 
erful and approved methods of cultivation, in the 
sanguine but rather forlorn hope of converting 
them into valuable fruit-trees. The principal 
esculent use of British nuts is the same inglori- 
ous yet important one as that of acorns,—the 
feeding of swine. Foreign nuts, however, pos- 
sess much economical value as an article of 
human food; and, in some instances, they are 
dried, preserved for a comparatively long period, 
and baked into bread. “In the Cevennes,” says 
Mr. Cadell, “ the inhabitants have a process of 
kiln-drying them, so that they will keep good for 
two or three years. The process consists in ex- 
posing the chestnuts, on the floor of a kiln, to 
the smoke of a smothered wood fire. The heat 
is applied gently, so as to make the internal 
moisture transpire through the husk of the 
chestnut. The fire is kept gentle for two or 
three days, and then is gradually increased dur- 
ing nine or ten days. The chestnuts are then 
CHESTNUT-TREE. 
turned with a shovel, and the fire is continued 
till they are ready. This is known by taking 
out a few and thrashing them; if they quit their 
inner skin, they are done. The chestnuts are 
then put in a bag, and thrashed with sticks, to 
separate the external and internal husk. If the | 
husks are left on, as is practised in the Limousin, 
the chestnuts become black, by imbibing from the 
husk the empyreumatic oil of the wood smoke, 
and do not keep so well.” 
The chestnut-tree thrives in sandy or gravelly 
soils, in any sheltered or mild situation ; it pros- 
pers still more, and often attains its noblest con- 
dition, in rich sandy loam; and it usually does 
best of all in very rich loam, or in friable clay, 
upon thoroughly porous substrata. The small 
nuts of English growth serve quite as well for 
raising either timber or ornamental trees, as 
seeds procured from abroad. But when foreign 
seeds are preferred, they ought to be preserved 
in sand, and put to the test in water. The nuts 
should be put in the ground in February, at four 
inches distance from one another, with their eye 
uppermost, in drills four inches deep, and twelve 
inches asunder. The seedlings must be kept 
thoroughly weeded; they may remain two years 
in the. seed-bed ; they may be transplanted in 
February, but will do better to be transplanted 
in October; they should, at transplantation, have 
their tap-root shortened, and be placed in rows 
at a foot from plant to plant, and a yard from 
row to row; and they may remain in the nur- 
sery-bed, the stronger during three years, and 
the weaker during four. Seedlings are liable to 
have crooked stems; but when they are trans- 
planted into their final situation, and have 
ample room and abundant air, they become 
straight. 
Any one sowing of chestnuts, even though all | 
the nuts sown were from one tree, will produce 
some plants with fruit or leaves observably dif- 
ferent from those of the normal chestnut tree. 
Most of such varieties are slight and fugitive; | 
but some, produced in former times, are so well | 
defined as to look almost like distinct species, 
and, for the sake of either ornamental features 
or the properties of their fruit, are preserved and 
propagated by inarching and grafting. In many 
countries in which the trees are cultivated for 
their fruit, scions of plants bearing the largest 
and fairest fruit are grafted upon stocks raised 
from nuts; but most of such plants are defective 
in ornamental character, and all are very poor or 
totally useless as timber trees. In our own 
country, six well defined varieties are commonly 
raised in the public nurseries as ornamental 
trees;—the fern-leaved or asplenium-leaved, C. 
asplenifolia, heterophylla, salicifolia, or laciniata ; 
the American, C. Americana, the smooth-leaved 
or shining-leaved, C. glabra or C. foliis lucidis ; 
the spiral, C. cochleata ; the glaucous-leaved, C. 
glauca ; and the variegated-leaved or gold-striped, 
C. varvegata or OC. foliis awreis, All these varie- 
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