Chapter III: Part 3

Food differs from fuel chiefly in the one particular, that in each little packet of food done up by Mother Nature there is placed along with the fuel for burning a tiny bit of material to be used for repair of the machine. In other words, food represents in its composition both the coal and the metal repair materials of the locomotive. The starch, sugar and fat of foods are the coal and the protein or albumin is the metal repair stuff. Here we see at once the reason why starch and sugar and fat are so abundant in our foodstuffs, while protein or albumin is in quantity a minor element.

But there are other differences between food and common fuel which are worthy of mention. The water and the salts are essential to meet the body's needs, especially the various mineral elements, lime, soda, potash and iron. All these we must have--lime for the bones and nerves, soda and potash to neutralize the harmful acid products of combustion processes, and iron for the blood.

All these are found in normal foodstuffs, but in greatly varying proportions, so that a pretty large variety of foods must be eaten to make sure that each of the different food principles required for perfect nutrition are supplied in ample quantity.

In recent years science has discovered another and most surprising property of food in which it transcends all other fuel substances as a diamond from the Transvaal outshines a lump of coal. Natural food contains vitamines. It has long been known that an exclusive rice diet sometimes causes beri-beri, a form of general neuritis, and that a diet of dry cereals and preserved food in time gives rise to scurvy, but the reason was a profound mystery. In very recent years it has been learned that the real cause of beri-beri and scurvy is the lack of vitamines which are associated with the bran of cereals and so are removed in the process of polishing rice and in the bolting of wheat and other grains.

Vitamines do not enter into the composition of the body as do other food principles, but they are somehow necessary to activate or render active the various subtle elements which are essential to good nutrition.

There are several kinds of vitamines. Some are associated with the bran of cereals, other with the juices of fruits. Some are easily destroyed by heat, while others survive a boiling temperature. The discovery of vitamines must stand as one of the most masterly achievements of modern science, even outshining in brilliancy the discovery of radium. It was only by the most persevering efforts and the application of all the refinements of modern chemical technic that the chemist, Funk, was able to capture and identify this most subtle but marvelously potent element of the food. This discovery has cleared up a long category of medical mysteries. We now know not only the cause of beri-beri and scurvy and the simple method of cure by supplying vitamine-containing foods, but within a very short time it has been shown that rickets and pellagra are likewise deficiency diseases, probably due to lack of vitamines, and in a recent discussion before the New York Academy of Medicine by Funk, Holt, Jacobi and others, it was maintained that vast multitudes of people are suffering from disorders of nutrition due to the same cause.

Osborne a few years ago conducted experiments which demonstrated that something more than pure food elements and salts is essential for growth and development. They found that rats fed on starch and fat lived only four to eight weeks. When protein was added they sometimes lived and grew and sometimes remained stunted or died. It was thus evident that proteins differ. Their observations proved very clearly that there are perfect and imperfect proteins. The protein of corn, zein, for example, was shown to be incapable of supporting life. With the addition of a chemical fraction, tryptophan, obtained from another protein, the rats lived, but did not grow. By adding another fractional protein, lysin, the rats were made to thrive.

A minute study of the subject by Osborne, Mendel and numerous other physiologic chemists have shown that a perfect protein is composed of more than a dozen different bodies called amino-acids, each of which must be present in the right proportion to enable the body to use the protein in body building. Each plant produces its one peculiar kind of protein. The protein of milk, caseine, is a perfect protein. Eggs and meat, of course, supply complete proteins, but among plants there are many imperfect proteins.

McCollum has demonstrated that grains, either singly or in combination will not maintain life and growth. The same is true of a mixture of grains with peas or navy beans. Another element is lacking which must be supplied to support life and growth.

With these facts before us we are prepared to inquire what place in the dietary are nuts prepared to fill? With few exceptions nuts contain little carbohydrate (starch or sugar). They are, however, rich in fat and protein. On account of their high fat content they are the most highly concentrated of all natural foods. A pound of nuts contains on an average more than 3,000 calories or food units, double the amount supplied by grains, four times as much as average meats and ten times as much as average fruits or vegetables.

For example, according to Jaffi's table, ten of our common nuts contain on an average 20.7 per cent. of protein, 53 per cent. of fat and 18 per cent. of carbohydrate, as shown in the following table:

Protein Fat Carbohydrate
Almonds 21.4 54.4 13.8
Peanuts 29.8 46.5 17.1
Filberts 16.5 64.0 11.7
Hickory 15.4 67.4 11.4
Pine nut 33.9 48.2 6.5
Walnut 18.2 60.7 13.7
Pecan 12.0 70.7 18.5
Butternut 27.9 61.2 5.7
Beechnut 21.8 49.9 13.8
Chestnut 10.7 7.8 70.1
------ ------ ------
Average 20.76 53.08 18.23

Meat (round steaks) gives 19.8 per cent. of protein and 15.6 per cent. of fat, with no carbohydrate. A pound of average nuts contains the equivalent of a pound of beefsteak, and in addition, nearly half a pound of butter and a third of a loaf of bread. A nut is, in fact, a sort of vegetable meat. Its composition is much the same as that of fat meat, only it is in much more concentrated form.

There can be no doubt that the nut is a highly concentrated food. The next question naturally is, can the body utilize the energy stored in nuts as readily as that supplied by meat products, for example.

The notion that nuts are difficult of digestion has really no foundation in fact. The idea is probably the natural outgrowth of the custom of eating nuts at the close of a meal when an abundance, more likely a super-abundance, of highly nutritious foods has already been eaten, and the equally injurious custom of eating nuts between meals. Neglect of thorough mastication must also be mentioned as a possible cause of indigestion following the use of nuts. Nuts are generally eaten dry and have a firm hard flesh which requires thorough use of the organs of mastication to prepare them for the action of the several digestive juices. Experiments made in Germany showed that nuts are not digested at all, but pass through the alimentary canal like foreign bodies unless reduced to a smooth paste before swallowing. Particles of nuts the size of small seeds wholly escaped digestion.

Having been for more than fifty years actively interested in promoting the use of nuts as a staple food, I have given considerable thought and study to their dietetic value and have made many experiments. About twenty-five years ago it occurred to me that one of the above objections to the extensive dietetic use of nuts might be overcome by mechanical preparation of the nut before serving so as to reduce it to a smooth paste and thus insure the preparation for digestion which the average eater is prone to neglect. My first experiments were with the peanut. The result was a product which I called peanut butter. I was much surprised at the readiness with which the product sprang into public favor. Several years ago I was informed by a wholesale grocer of Chicago that the firm's sales of peanut butter amounted on an average to a carload a week. I think it is safe to estimate that not less than one thousand carloads of this product are annually consumed in this country. The increased demand for peanuts for making peanut butter led to the development of "corners" in the peanut market, and more than doubled the price of the shelled nuts and to a marked degree influenced the annual production. The nut butter idea also caught on in England.

I am citing my experience with the peanut not for the purpose of recommending this product, for I am obliged to confess that I was soon compelled to abandon the use of peanut butter prepared from roasted nuts for the reason that the process of roasting renders the nut indigestible to such a degree that it was not adapted to the use of invalids. I only mention the circumstance as an illustration of the readiness with which the public accepts a new dietetic idea when it happens to strike the popular fancy.

Ways may be found to render the use of nuts practical by adapting them to our culinary and dietetic customs and to overcome the popular objections to their use by a widespread and efficient campaign of education. Other nuts, when crushed, made most delicious "butters," as easily digestible as cream, since they did not require roasting. I later found ways for preparing the peanut without roasting.

The fats of nuts, their chief food principle, are the most digestible of all forms of fat. Having a low melting point they are far more digestible than most animal fats. Hippocrates noted that the stearin of eels was difficult of digestion. The indigestibility of beef and mutton fat has long been recognized. The fat of nuts much more closely resembles human fat than do fats of the sort mentioned. The importance of this will be appreciated when attention is called to the fact that fats entering the body do not undergo the transformation changes which take place in other foodstuffs; for example, protein in the process of digestion is broken into its ultimate molecular units. Starch is transformed into sugar which serves as fuel to the body, but fats are so slightly modified in the process of digestion and absorption that after reaching the blood and the tissues they are reconstructed into the original form in which they are eaten, that is, beef fat is deposited in the tissues as beef fat without undergoing any chemical change whatever; mutton fat is deposited as mutton fat; lard as pig fat, etc. When the body makes its own fat from starch or sugar, the natural source of this tissue element, the product formed is _sui generis_ and must be better adapted to the body uses than the animal fat which was _sui generis_ to a pig, a sheep or a goat. It is certainly a pleasant thought that one who rounds out his figure with the luscious fatness of nuts may felicitate himself upon the fact that his tissues are participating in the sweetness of the nut rather than the relic of the sty and the shambles.

It is also worthy of note that the fat of nuts exists in a finely divided state, and that in the chewing of nuts a fine emulsion is produced so that nut fats enter the stomach in a form best adapted for prompt digestion.

Another question which will naturally arise is this: if nuts are to be granted the place of a staple in our list of food supplies will it be safe to accept them as a substitute for flesh foods?

Beef steak has become almost a fetish with many people, but the experiments of Chittenden and others have demonstrated that the amount of protein needed by the body daily is so small that it is scarcely possible to arrange a bill of fare to include flesh foods without making the protein intake excessive. This is because the ordinary foodstuffs other than meat contain a sufficient amount of protein to meet the needs of the body. Nuts present their protein in combination with so large a proportion of easily digestible fat that there is comparatively little danger of getting an excess.

It is also worthy of note that the protein of nuts is superior in quality to that of grains and vegetables. The critically careful analyses made in recent years have shown that the proteins of nuts, at least of a number of them, contain all the elements needed for building up complete body proteins, in other words, nuts furnish perfect proteins, which are not supplied so abundantly by any other vegetable product.

This fact places the nut in an exceedingly important position as a foodstuff. In face of vanishing meat supplies it is most comforting to know that meats of all sorts may be safely replaced by nuts not only without loss, but with a decided gain. Nuts have several advantages over flesh foods which are well worth considering.

1. Nuts are free from waste products, uric acid, urea, carmine and other tissue wastes.

2. Nuts are aseptic, free from putrefactive bacteria and do not readily undergo decay either in the body or outside of it. Meats, on the other hand, are practically always in an advanced stage of putrefaction, as found in the meat markets. Ordinarily meats contain from three million to ten times that number of bacteria per ounce, and such meats as hamburger steak often contain more than a billion putrefactive organisms to the ounce. Nuts are clean and sweet.

3. Nuts are free from trichinae, tapeworm and other parasites, as well as the infections due to specific disease. Nuts are in good health when gathered and remain so until eaten. The contrast between the delectable product of the beautiful walnut, chestnut or pecan tree and the abattoir recalls the story of the Tennessee school teacher who was told when she made inquiry about a certain shoulder of pork which had been promised in part payment of services, but had not arrived: "Dad didn't kill the pig." "And why not," said the teacher. "Because," replied the observing youngster, "he got well." Nearly all the cows slaughtered are tuberculous. They are killed to be eaten because too sick to longer serve as community wet nurses.

That nuts are competent to serve as staple foods might be inferred from a fact to which Professor Matthews, of the New York Museum of Natural History, calls attention to, to wit, that our remote ancestors, the first mammals, were all nut and fruit eaters. They may have gobbled an insect now and then, but their staple food was fruits and nuts, with tender shoots and succulent roots, which is still true of those old fashioned forest folks, the primates of which the orang outang, the chimpanzee and the gorilla are consistent representatives, while their near relative, also a primate, civilized man, has departed from his original bill of fare and has exploited the bills of fare of the whole animal kingdom.

The keeper of the famous big apes of the London Zoo informed me that they were never given meat. Even the small monkeys generally regarded as insectivorous, were confined to a rigid vegetarian fare and were thriving.

Whole races of men, comprising many millions, live their entire lives without meats of any sort, and when fed a sufficient amount are wonderfully vigorous, prolific, enduring and intelligent. Witness the Brahmins of India, the Buddists of China and Japan and the teeming millions of Central Africa.

Carl Mann, the winner of the great walking match between Berlin and Dresden, performed his great feat on a diet of nuts with lettuce and fruits. The Finn Kilmamen, the world's greatest runner, eats no meat. Weston, the long-distance champion, never eats meat when taking a long walk. The Faramahara Indians, the fleetest and most enduring runners in the world are strict vegetarians. The gorilla, the king of the Congo forests, is a nut feeder. Milo, the mighty Greek, was a flesh abstainer, as was also Pythagoras, the first of the Greek philosophers, Seneca, the noble Roman Senator, and Plutarch, the famous biographer. The writer has excluded meat from his diet for more than fifty years, and has within the last forty years, supervised the treatment of more than a hundred thousand sick people at the Battle Creek Sanitarium on a meatless diet.

Even carnivorous animals nourish on a diet of nuts with other vegetable foods and cooked cereals. The Turks mix nuts with their pilaff of rice and the Armenians add nuts to their baalghoor, a dish prepared from wheat which has been cooked and dried.

That nuts are not only competent to serve as a staple food, but that they may fill a very important place as accessory foods in supplementing the imperfect proteins of the grains and vegetables is shown in a very conclusive way by an extended research by Dr. Hoobler, of Detroit.

Before describing Dr. Hoobler's experiment I may be allowed to explain that some years ago, in 1899, I was asked by the then United States Secretary of Agriculture to undertake experiments for the purpose of providing a vegetable substitute for meat. Dr. Dabney said there was no doubt that the time would come when such substitutes would be needed on account of the scarcity of meat. I succeeded in developing several products which have come to be quite widely known and used more or less extensively in this country and Europe. Among these were Protose (resembling potted meat) and malted nuts, a soluble product somewhat resembling malted milk. It was noted that the malted nuts when used by nursing mothers greatly increased the flow of milk and promoted the health of the infant. Recently Dr. Hoobler undertook an extensive feeding experiment with nursing mothers and wet nurses as subjects. He made use of these nut preparations as well as of ordinary nuts and compared the results with various combinations into which meat and milk entered in various proportions. He found that a diet of fruits, grains and vegetables alone gave a very poor quality of milk, but when nuts were added the result was a milk supply superior in quantity and quality to any other combination of foodstuffs, not excepting those which included liberal quantities of milk, meat and eggs. From this it appears that nuts possess such superior qualities as supplementary or accessory foods that they are able to replace not only meats, but even eggs and milk in the dietary. The full account of Dr. Hoobler's interesting observations will be found in the Journal of the American Medical Association for August 11, 1917.

Extensive feeding experiments are now being conducted at the research laboratory of the Battle Creek Sanitarium, which it is hoped will develop still other points of interest respecting the superior nutritive properties of the choicest and most remarkable of all the food products which are handed to us from the fertile laboratory of the vegetable world.

Another and most interesting phase of my subject is the relation of nut feeding to anaphylaxis. This newly coined word perhaps needs explanation for the benefit of my lay hearers. For many years it has been known that some persons were astonishingly sensitive to certain foods which indeed appeared to act as violent poisons. Oysters, shellfish, mutton, fish and other animal products, as well as a few vegetable products, especially honey, strawberries and buckwheat, were most likely to be the cause of these violent disturbances. More recently it has been found that cow's milk very often shows the same peculiarity. It is now known that this remarkable phenomenon is due to the fact that the body sometimes becomes sensitized to certain proteins which thereafter act as most violent poisons and may cause death. Sensitization to animal proteins is much the more frequent. In such cases nut products become a very precious resource. This is especially true with reference to cow's milk.

Liquid nut preparations have saved the lives of hundreds of infants within the last twenty years. I have had the pleasure of meeting several fine looking young people who owed their lives to nut-feeding when other resources had failed. One case was particularly interesting. A telegram from a well-known Senator at Washington announced the fact that his infant daughter and only child was dying from mal-nutrition, as cow's milk and all the known infant foods had been found to disagree. I advised nut-feeding, and fortunately the prescription suited the case and the little one began to improve at once. When the physician in attendance learned that the child was eating nuts he vigorously protested, declaring that such a diet was preposterous and would certainly kill the infant, but the child flourished wonderfully on the liquid nut diet, eating almost nothing else for the first three years of her life, and today is a splendidly developed young woman, a brilliant witness to the food value of nuts.

I have by no means exhausted the physiologic phases of my subject, but will now turn a moment in concluding my paper, to its economic aspects.

The high price of nuts is constantly urged as an objection to their use as a staple. It is probable that a largely increased demand would lead to so great an increase in the supply that the cost of production, and hence the cost to the consumer, would be decreased. But even at the present prices the choicest varieties of nuts are cheaper than meats if equivalent food values are compared. This is clearly shown by the following table which indicates the amounts of various flesh foods which are equivalent to one pound of walnut meats.

Beef loin, lean 4.00 pounds
Beef ribs, lean 6.50 "
Beef neck, lean 9.50 "
Veal 5.50 "
Mutton leg, lean 4.20 "
Ham, lean 3.00 "
Fowls 4.00 "
Chicken, broilers 10.00 "
Red bass 25.00 "
Trout 4.80 "
Frogs' legs 15.00 "
Oysters 13.50 "
Lobsters 22.00 "
Eggs 5.00 "
Milk 9.50 "
Evaporated cream 4.00 "

But the great economic importance of the encouragement of nut culture in every civilized land is best shown by comparing the amount of food which may be annually produced by an acre of land planted to nut trees and the same area devoted to the production of beef. I am credibly informed that two acres of land and two years are required to produce a steer weighing 600 pounds. The product of one acre for one year would be one-fourth as much, or 150 pounds of steer. The same land planted to walnut trees would produce, if I am correctly informed, an average of at least 100 pounds per tree per annum for the first twenty years. Forty trees to the acre would aggregate 4,000 pounds of nuts, or 1,000 pounds of walnut meats. The highest food value which could be ascribed to the 150 pounds of beef would be 150,000 calories or food units. The food value of the nut meats would be 3,000,000 calories, or twenty times as much food from the nut trees as from the fattened steer, and food of the same general character, protein and fat, but of superior quality.

One acre of walnut trees will produce every year food equal to:

14,000 lbs. red bass (a ship load).
3,000 " beef (five steers).
7,500 " chicken broilers.
15,000 " lobsters.
10,000 " oysters.
60,000 eggs (5,000 dozen).
4,000 qts. milk.
A ton of mutton (13 sheep).
250,000 frogs.

And when one acre will do so much, think of the product
of a million acres.
Ten times the product of all the fisheries of the country.
Half as much as all the poultry of the country.
One seventh as much as all the beef produced.
More than twice the value of all the sheep.
Half as much as all the pork.
And many millions of acres may be thus utilized in nut culture.
And the walnut is not the only promising food tree. The hickory,
the pecan, the butternut, the filbert and the piñon are all
capable of producing equal or greater results.

A single acre of nut trees will produce protein enough to feed four persons a year and fat enough for twice that number of average persons. So 25,000,000 acres of nut trees would more than supply the whole people of the United States with their two most expensive food stuffs. Cereals and fresh vegetables, our cheapest foods, would be needed for the carbohydrate portion of the dietary. Just think of it. A little nut orchard 200 miles square supplying one-third enough food to feed one hundred million of citizens. The trouble is the frogs and cattle are eating up our food supplies. We feed a steer 100 pounds of food and get back only 2.8 pounds. If we plant 10 pounds of corn we get back 500 pounds. If we plant one walnut we get back in twenty harvests a ton of choicest food. In nut culture there is a treasury of wealth and health and national prosperity and safety that is at present little appreciated.

* * * * *

Here is a veritable treasury of wealth, a potential food supply which may save the world from any suggestion of hunger for centuries to come if properly utilized. Every man who cuts down a timber tree should be required to plant a nut tree. A nut tree has a double value. It produces valuable timber and yields every year a rich harvest of food while it is growing.

Every highway should be lined with nut trees. Nut trees will grow on land on which no other crop will grow and which is even worthless for grazing. The piñon flourishes in the bleak and barren peaks of the rockies.

The nut should no longer be considered a table luxury. It should become a staple article of food and may most profitably replace the pork and meats of various sorts which are inferior foods and are recognized as prolific sources of disease.

* * * * *

Ten nut trees planted for each inhabitant will insure the country against any possibility of food shortage. A row of nut trees on each side of our 5,000,000 miles of country roads will provide for a population of 160,000,000. With a vanishing animal industry, nut culture offers the only practical solution of the question of food supply. As the late Prof. Virchow said, "The future is with the vegetarians."

THE IMPORTANCE OF NUT GROWING.

H. W. COLLINGWOOD, NEW JERSEY.

In these days the importance of most things is valued in figures. I never was good at figures. It seems to me that you can do anything you like with figures, except make them clear, yet it was the failure to figure that gave me my first idea of the importance of nut culture. Some 50 years ago a small boy on a New England farm could not, or would not, do his sums in the old Coburn Arithmetic. It made no difference that the teacher called it Mathematics, and pointed it with the end of a hickory stick. By any other name it was not sweet.

This boy got stuck on a question about a hare and a hound. It appeared that the hare jumped a rod at a time, and made 33 jumps a minute. The hound started 200 feet behind the hare. This hound made 18 ft. at a jump, and made 321/2 jumps a minute. Now, would the hound catch the hare before they got to a hickory tree half a mile away?

I am glad they introduced that hickory tree because the question was a hard nut at best and needed brain food. I couldn't tell where the hare would be, and I can't now; nor do I believe that some of you wise heads, grown hairless with constant thinking, could really tell how the hare came out. If I saw one of my children headed for me with such a problem in hand, I confess that I should make a prompt engagement outside. The old folks who brought me up, had sterner ways of enforcing education. They decided that the boy should live on brown bread and water until he did that example. In order to assist hunger in bringing the boy to it, after the first day showed that the boy was still going, the old gentleman hunted up all the axes and hatchets, scythes and knives on the place, and made the boy turn grindstone while he held the implements on. Greek met Greek. The boy wouldn't give in, and the old man couldn't and preserve his dignity, but try as he might the old man could not tire out the boy; the old hands gave out first, and the old man straightened his back and gazed at that wonderful boy. Now it wasn't in brown bread and water to sustain strength and will in that way. Not when there are baked beans for supper and you can smell them! The old man had to acknowledge a higher power which beat him. He wouldn't do it openly, that was not the New England way, but he did it on the second night by helping the boy to baked beans and fried potatoes without a word. The old man went to his death thinking that he had a most wonderful boy, and the little fellow did not give his secret away. Now we may have it as a slight contribution to the importance of nut culture. The sustaining power which carried the boy through his trial was the hickory nut. There was a pile of them in the attic, and the boy on the quiet, cracked and ate a quart of them every day. That boy could not spell protein to save his life, and carbo-hydrates would have scared him off the floor, but the nuts and the brown bread gave him a balanced ration which did everything except find out about the hound and the hare. I think it would have required a balanced ration fed to an unbalanced brain to settle that problem.

Now I think the importance of the nut industry must come to the general public in that way, through the stomach rather than through the mind. The human mind is a marvelous piece of mental machinery, so is the machine which sets type or weaves fine cloth, yet both are powerless unless the fire pot under the engine, or the stomach of the man, are kept filled with fuel or food. I have heard very old men tell of the prejudice which existed against coal, years ago, in New England, when attempts were made to introduce the new fuel. Cord wood was the local fuel, people knew what it was, and its preparation provided a local industry. The introduction of coal meant destruction for this local business of wood cutting, and wiped out the value of many a farm. Coal had to win its way against prejudice and local interest, and it only won out by showing power. I am sure that 75 years ago, if some visionary Yankee had said that coal would be so freely used in New England that cord wood would be almost unsaleable, the public would surely have given him that honorary title which goes with prospective and persistent knowledge, "nut."

In like manner the importance of nut growing will not be truly recognized until we can show a man in the most practical way that nuts provide the energy to be found in beef steak. It is said that knowledge creates an atmosphere in which prejudice cannot live. I know an old man who is absolutely settled in his conviction that New England has degenerated because her people have given up eating baked beans and cod fish balls, and introduced the sale of these delicacies in the West. That man says, with convincing logic, that in the old days when New England lived on brown bread and baked beans, we produced statesmen on every rocky hillside, and we dominated the thought of the nation. Now, he says, we have not developed one single statesman since the canned baked bean industry took our specialty away from us. The only way to convince him is to produce a dozen statesmen out of men who are willing to subscribe to a diet of nuts. I have a friend who says he feels like throwing a brick every time he passes a modern laundry. He says the invention of the linen collar kept him a poor man. His grandfather invested the family fortune in the stock of a paper collar factory. Many of our older men remember the time when we all wore paper collars, and bought them by the dozen in boxes. It seemed like a sure thing when the old man put all his money into it. He figured that by 1915 there would be 40,000 people in this country, each one wearing at least 200 paper collars a year, something like the hound and the hare, perhaps, but he didn't know that the hare in this case would drop dead, and the hound double his jump, as happened to paper and linen collars. Some one invented the modern linen collar. The laundry service started up, and paper collars disappeared with the family fortune. Now, my friend must work for a living, and throw mental bricks at the laundry. In a way every new habit, or every new interference with the thought and method of the plain people must run the gauntlet and submit to just such violent changes.

Now the future of the nut business, which contains the importance of the industry, depends upon our ability to make the plain, common people understand that in the future we must cut our beef steak and our chops off a nut tree. We have made some of the brainy people understand this already, but the hound is still chasing the hare, and he is several jumps behind. You may say what you will, or think as highly as you like of your own place in society, but the world is not run or pushed on by the brainy people. They may steer it for a while and master it, but only at the permission of what I may call the stomach people, who always sooner or later rise up and dominate things. A gild-edged, red line edition of nut knowledge will get the few or select class, but in order to make the industry truly important we must make a homely appeal to the plain people. It seems to me that one of the most effective nut documents yet issued is that bulletin by George Carver, a colored man at the Tuskegee Institute. Carver simply makes his appeal to the Southern farmer, and he gives him 45 ways of cooking and eating peanuts. I rather think that Carver's work in trying to get the Southern negroes to eat more peanuts and more cow-peas has done about as much for the race as the academic instruction given in the college.

On the principle that "Like begets like," I feel sure that the continued practice of cracking the shell to get at the sweet meat inside will tend to put more phosphorus and less lime into the skull of the race. I once explained the nut proposition to an energetic man and he said: "Fine--the theory is perfect--now hire a man who lives on rare beef to get out and fight for your proposition and you will put it over!"

Last year I went up into New York State with a prominent public man, who was to make a speech. This man was delayed, and in order to get there he had to jump on the last platform of the last car. He had eaten no lunch, and only a light breakfast. He said he should surely fail in his speech because he was faint from lack of food. I asked him what he would eat if he had the chance. He said soup, half a chicken, potatoes and asparagus, and apple pie. I told the train boy to bring samples of everything he had, and we finally selected an apple from Oregon, a banana from Mexico, a box of figs from California, some pop corn from Massachusetts, chocolate from Venezuela, and salted nuts from Louisiana. The air and the sunshine and the water seemed to be produced in New York, but nothing else. A great dinner for a New York man, but to his surprise it satisfied him, took the place of the chicken, and carried him through his speech with a strong punch. It seems to me that one trouble with our nut propaganda is that we go at it in such a way that the pupils regard us somewhat as "nuts," and why should the man who becomes a specialist on any subject, and airs it on all occasions, be called a nut? We shall have to admit that men are called such names. I think it is because we let our brains work somewhat like the oyster or clam, and secrete a hard shell of formal knowledge around the sweet meat of condensed human nature, for that is what all useful knowledge is. We must crack our shell of formal knowledge and grind it up finer before we can put it into the think works of the plain people.

While I was working up the Apple Consumers' League some years ago, I ran upon the fact that Corbett, the prize-fighter, consumed 3 dishes of apple sauce every day while training. Now, I had used the statement that J. P. Morgan always had a baked apple for his lunch, but I got small results from that story. Few people ever expected to make millions, and Morgan was out of their class. Every man carried a punch, which he wanted to enlarge and make effective. If Corbett used apple sauce to oil his arm for a knock-out blow, every man with red blood wanted apples. Now we must work our nut campaign in some such popular way, if we expect to put a nut on the wheel of progress. The fact that Prof. Johnson, or Dr. Jackson, or the Rev. Thompson, or Judge Dixon, or Senator Harrison, find strength and comfort from eating nuts, is very important and very pleasant, but 99 per cent of our people never expect to enter the learned profession, and they must not get the idea that these professions stand around the full use of nuts like a barbed wire fence. Most men must live and work in the rough and tumble of life, and at present they think red meat is the sustaining power for that sort of stuff. We must change their point of view. Let us find athletes, baseball men, wrestlers, fighters, runners, men who stand well in popular sports and who will publicly state that they substitute nuts for meat in part at least. We must put this thing into the popular imagination of the plain people if it is to be of full importance. When some fellow with a new brand of cigarettes wants to develop a trade among young men, he gets some noted ball player to write a letter stating his love for that brand. I think we should follow that plan somewhat in putting our nut campaign before the people. Two years ago the Oregon Agricultural College sent a football team East. The college was almost unknown here, but I asked one or two football men about it. They laughed at these Pacific Coast athletes. Here was a college they said which had issued a bulletin advising the people to send their children to school with nut sandwiches instead of meat. This man said that such training could only result in puny, half grown men, and he doubted if this team would last half way across the country. Those Oregon boys lined up a team of giants. They simply wiped the earth with most teams of their class, and left behind the cracked shells of a long line of reputation, with the sweet meat well picked out.

Personally I believe that within 25 years, 50 at the latest, our people will be absolutely forced to accept a diet of nuts in place of our present proportion of meat. As I see it, the time is coming when increased population and shortage of available land will make prime, beef nearly as scarce as turkey and venison are today. Not only so, but I think knowledge will slowly but surely lead men to change their diet from choice. My children will live to see the time when the acre nut orchard on the average farm will be considered just as useful and as much of a necessity, and far more profitable, than the present chicken yard. In that day I think the nut industry will rank in food importance second only to that of corn, and I believe that the greatest change will be found here in New England, for I believe that nut culture is to change history, and readjust population and industry to some extent. Frankly, I expect my children to live to see the time when the hickory nut in New England will rank far above the walnut industry in California or in France. I think this nut culture will, in time, bring a greater income to the New England States than all its fruits and grain combined today. Out in the wild woods on some New England hillside there are growing today strains or varieties of nuts which will do far more for this section than the Baldwin apple, or the Bartlett pear have ever done. They will be found, tamed and propagated.

You may, if you like, call me a dreamer, or what is the same thing, a "nut." I can stand that, for have I not in my short span of life seen dreams come true. Suppose the wandering hunter, or the farmer's boy, who discovered the Baldwin apple in the woods of Massachusetts, had gone back to his home and stated that the time would come when this beautiful red fruit would grow wherever it found a suitable climate, that it would revolutionize horticulture, bring millions of dollars to New England, and find its way throughout the world wherever the sails of commerce are blown. They might have hung him as a witch or dreamer, and yet, his dream would be no more improbable than what I say of nut culture in New England. I have seen the telephone, the flying machine, the gasoline engine, all grow from the vain dream of a crazy inventor to public necessities, and as surely as fate the nut industry is to bring back to the old hillsides of New England much of the profit and the glory of old days.

THE PROPER PLACE OF NUT TREES IN THE PLANTING PROGRAM.

BY C. A. REED, NUT CULTURIST,

U. S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE.

In the planting of trees for most purposes, it is now possible to exercise practically the same degree of choice with regard to special fitness as is employed in the selection of men for positions or tools for a piece of work. The fruit grower in every part of the country has his special species and pomological varieties from which to choose. The foresters and landscape gardeners have their species and botanical varieties or improved strains to pick from.

Among the important purposes for which trees are planted the production of native nuts is singularly behind. The leading species of native nut-bearing trees include the hickories, the walnuts, the chestnuts, the pines, and the beech. Of these, one of the hickories, the pecan, is the only species which has so far been developed by cultivation as to become of importance for the production of an orchard product.

The timber of the pecan is less valuable than is that of most other hickories, and is in commercial use only as second-class material. However, it is the most important species of nut-bearing tree in the United States. Its native and introduced range includes the fertile lands of the plains of practically the entire southeastern quarter of the country. It is neither an upland nor a wet land tree. In the United States it is not found in the mountainous sections, nor, to any important extent, south of Middle Florida. In Mexico, it is occasionally found on mountain sides at considerable elevations and by some is supposed to be there indigenous. However, according to "Pomological Possibilities of Texas," written by Gilbert Onderdonk, of Nursery, Texas, and published by the State Department of Agriculture in 1911, its success at those altitudes is vitally dependent upon the water supply. In each case investigated by Mr. Onderdonk, while upon official trips made for the United States Department of Agriculture, he found the pecan trees to be adjacent to some stream, either natural or artificial. "At Bustamente," says Mr. Onderdonk, "one hundred and seven miles beyond Laredo, are pecan trees two hundred years old that have been watered all their lives and have continued productive. From these trees, grown from Texas pecans, pecan culture has been extended until there are now thousands of thrifty pecan trees under irrigation. One owner of a small lot sold his water right when his trees were about seventy-five years old, and when the writer visited his grounds fourteen years later, every one of his trees was either dead or dying."

We may yet find the pecan to be suitable for plateau or mountain land growth, but as Mr. Onderdonk reports was the case in Mexico, it is also the case here. The species must have ample water. With the proper amount of moisture, neither too much nor yet too little, there is no way of predicting to what altitudes or even latitudes it may be taken. Its northernmost points of native range are near Davenport, Iowa, and Terre Haute, Indiana. Iowa seed planted in 1887, at South Haven, Michigan, on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, at a latitude of about 421/2 degrees, have never been seriously affected by winter temperatures. However, they have fruited but little. So far as the writer can ascertain the crops of nuts have been insignificant both as regards quantity and character. Dr. Deming reports a large tree at Hartford, Conn., at a latitude of nearly 42 degrees which, judging from a photograph which he took several years ago, was then 3 feet in diameter and quite at home, so far as growth was concerned.

Other planted trees are fairly numerous along the Atlantic Coast between Washington and New York. There is one in the southern part of Lancaster County, Pa., near Colemanville, but so far as is known to the U. S. Department of Agriculture, important crops of nuts have never been realized from any of these northern trees. Crops from the native trees in the bottoms north of latitude 39 degrees or approximately that of Washington, D. C., and Vincennes, Indiana, are fairly uncertain. Northern nurserymen are now disseminating promising varieties of pecans from what has come to be known as the "Indiana district," which includes the southwestern part of that state, northwestern Kentucky and southwestern Illinois. In many respects these varieties compare very favorably with the so-called "papershells" of the southern states. They are believed to be of very great promise for northern planting in sections to which they may be adapted. However, before any northern varieties are planted for commercial (orchard) purposes, they should be fully tested as to their adaptability in the particular section where the planting is to take place. The commercial propagation of northern varieties of pecans began less than ten years ago; the first attempts were not generally successful, and as a result there are no budded or grafted trees of northern varieties yet of bearing age.

Aside from the pecan there are no named Pomological varieties of any native nut now being propagated, with very few exceptions. So far as these exceptions are concerned, it is probable that fewer than one hundred budded or grafted trees of such varieties are yet of bearing age, and of such as have attained the age at which fruit might be expected, exceedingly few have borne in paying quantities for any number of consecutive years. Therefore, with reference to the planting of native nut species for profit, the truth of the situation is simply this: In the ordinary course of events, with the exception of the pecan, years of experimentation in the testing of varieties and in a study of their cultural requirements must be gone through before any native species of nut-bearing trees can be planted in any of the northern states with a certainty of commercial return from nuts alone which would be comparable with that of many other crops which already are upon a well established commercial basis in this part of the country.

With reference to two of the foreign species of nuts which have been introduced, the situation is quite different. In order of commercial importance of the nuts now grown in this country, two foreign species, the Persian (English) walnut and the almond, stand second and third, respectively, the pecan, which is an American species only, being first. With these exceptions, the foreign introductions are all in the experimental or test stage, and while possibly the European hazel (filbert) may now be making a strong bid for commercial recognition in the northwest, and the pistache in parts of California, neither species can yet be recommended for commercial planting.

With the exception of a few hardshell varieties of almonds, which are practically as hardy as the peach and which are suitable only for home planting, as they are in no way to be compared with the almond of commerce, there is now no indication that this species is destined ever to be come of commercial importance east of the Rocky Mountains.

The Persian or so-called English walnut is of commercial importance in this county only in the far Western States. In the South, it has thus far failed altogether. In the North and East it has held out gleams of hope, first bright, then dull, for more than a century. There is no way of telling the number of trees of this species which have been planted in the northeastern section of the country, but let us imagine it to have been sixty thousand. Of these fully fifty per cent have succumbed to climatic conditions; twenty-five per cent have been but semi-hardy, and possibly twenty-five per cent have attained the bearing age. A part of each of the last two classes have borne crops of commercial size for a number of years. Some have produced nuts of good size and quality. A great many of all those surviving are now proving susceptible to a walnut blight upon which Mr. McMurran is to report tomorrow. A liberal estimate of the present number of bearing Persian walnut trees in this part of the country would be ten per cent of the original supposed sixty thousand or six thousand trees. Of these, the writer has positive knowledge of none which are now bearing crops of nuts in such quantity, and of such size, and quality and with such regularity and which have so borne for such length of time as to encourage commercial planting. Few of the eastern grown nuts are so free from tannin as to be really pleasing to the taste, or favorably comparable with the best nuts of the market. The writer is now closely watching the best known varieties which the nurserymen are putting out, but at the present time there is no variety which, in his judgment, should be commercially planted without further testing.

The proper place for such partially improved species, as are most of the nut producers hardy in this section at the present time, is that in which they may be used for more than the single purpose of nut production. Most of the species of the botanical family _Juglandaceae_, to which the walnuts and hickories belong, are slow growers, and as such, are objectionable to the average planter. In answer to this, it may be said that among trees, slowness of growth is invariably associated with longevity of tree and its value when cut as timber. Also, when due pains are taken, it is possible to select species which are exceedingly satisfactory in the landscape. Several of the slides, which are to follow, illustrate the individual beauty of selected nut trees, and some show their effective use in the landscape.