Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/448

434 through the midst of that perpetual battling competition for the surface of the earth which goes on as fiercely between trees and plants as between men themselves or other animals. To put it briefly in a single phrase, we may say at once that a choke-cherry is one of the kind of fruits which want to be eaten, and sedulously lay themselves out beforehand for that very particular purpose.

But, when we turn from the choke-cherry to the hickory-trees which grow close by, we are brought face to face at once with another and very different state of things. If the choke-cherry wants to be eaten, the hickory-nut clearly wants to avoid that unpleasant and destructive predicament. In the first place, its color, instead of being brilliant and attractive, like that of most edible fruits, is very quiet and unobtrusive, being green while the nut still remains among the fresh foliage upon the branches of the tree, and pale brown when it falls upon the dead leaves and dry grasses that cover the damp and moldering ground beneath. If the hickory-nut were a conscious creature which deliberately wished to escape notice, these are the precise tactics which it would be likely to adopt for the sake of protection. Then, again, even when its disguise is pierced, and the nut, with its outer husk entire, is spied upon the ground by some hungry animal, it is coated with a very nasty, bitter covering, which effectually repels one from tearing it open readily with the teeth. We hand-wearing human beings, however, may perhaps manage to peel off the outer husk with a knife or stone, or, by more popular practice, to put a lot of the nuts together in a wheat-sack and thrash them out by stamping on them with our feet. Even so, however, we still have the actual woody inner nut-shell itself to deal with; and unless we have arrived at that highest stage of civilization where nut-crackers are specially manufactured for us, to aid us in the struggle, we must crack them as best we may with our own precious and too unstable molars. But the native enemies of the hickory-nut—squirrels and the like—can not proceed in any such crunching and radically destructive fashion. They must bore a hole through the shell somewhere, and then extract the kernel little by little with their long, sharp, curved front teeth; and, somehow, the arrangement of the nut inside the shell is of such sort as to render this work of gradual excavation as difficult as possible for the aggressive rodent. The kernel, instead of being all plain and straightforward, as in the acorn or the chestnut, is divided up and frittered away in little troublesome cricks and corners which seem as if they had been invented on purpose to prevent you from getting a single good bite out of the nut in any part whatsoever. Clearly, the hickory-nut is in all these respects the exact antipodes of the choke-cherry: it doesn't want to get eaten if it can by any means possibly help it.

This glimpse at the habits and manners of the hickory enables us to give a brief and intelligible answer to the question. What is a nut? The reply is, a fruit that tries by inconspicuous coloring and hard