41. The Pecan. We usually think of the pecan nut as different from the hickory, yet they belong to the same family. The pecan hickory is a southern tree which delights in the warm climate south of the Ohio River, and in Texas is found as a grand forest giant one hundred and fifty feet high, producing an enormous crop of the sweetest and most delicately flavored nuts. The leaf has nine leaflets and occasionally as many as fifteen.
Fig. 100.
Black Walnut Butternut
42. The Black Walnut and Butternut. Perhaps no two trees are so difficult for the city boy or girl to distinguish as the butternut and black walnut. Both have compound leaves, the number of leaflets varying from nine to seventeen for the butternut and from fifteen to twenty-three for the black walnut. A leaf having fifteen leaflets, then, might belong to either tree if there were no other way to distinguish them. The teeth on the black-walnut leaflet are larger and sharper than on the butternut, and the fuzzy stem is lacking. The green nuts, too, are different, the black walnuts being just about the size and shape of green lemons, the butternuts longer and thinner; but the unmistakable feature is the odor. Having once smelled the crushed leaves of a butternut and a black walnut, a person will thereafter need no other test.
The use of black-walnut lumber for making furniture was at one time very common. The great supply of this valuable wood has been exhausted and other woods have become fashionable. It is still used for gunstocks, for which purpose nothing seems better suited.
Butternut is a light-colored wood, but takes a good polish and is occasionally used in cabinet work.
43. The Locusts. The locust family is a large one; its members all bear compound leaves, and their fruit is in the form of beans instead of nuts.