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 THE EASTERN BLACK WALNUT "187

There is no reason to think that the best varieties of black walnut have yet been found, and it is highly probable that trees better than any now living have been destroyed in the slaughter ** of trees which has marked the whole era of the white man in America.

THE DEMAND FOR BLACK WALNUT MEATS

The black walnut is unique among commercial nuts in retaining its flavor when cooked. Cooking makes many other nuts lose flavor, but the black walnut comes through as tasty and attractive as ever. This is a great advantage in this age of factory-made food—ice cream and candy, nut bread and nut cake.

With the movement on in America for good health and physical efficiency there is an increasing emphasis upon the meatless diet. A large increase in population will force us in that direction through scarcity of meat. Under such conditions tasty black walnut bread made of whole wheat flour is not only good, nutritious, and wholesome, but is almost a complete substitute for bread, butter, and meat.

Ice cream manufacturers have been trying to buy walnut meats in twenty thousand pound lots. Apparently the future demand for the black walnut may far outrank the demand for

11 Some of these tree tragedies have probably destroyed parent nut trees that would have been worth millions if propagated in sufficient numbers. The following episode is a good illustration of this point.

Mr. Harry R. Weber, a lawyer of Cincinnati, with nut trees for an avocation, found in two successive years the shells of a black walnut resting on a wing dam in the Ohio River near Cincinnati. The shape of this shell both inside and outside bore such a resemblance to that of a Persian walnut that its kernel must have been very easy indeed to remove. Where had this nut tree grown—in all the wide reaches of the Ohio Valley above this dam upon which it had floated? Wide search, correspondence, and newspaper publicity all seemed finally to fix the place in Floyd County. Virginia, near the headwaters of the New River. Mr. John W. Hershey, of Pennsylvania, made a five hundred mile journey to investigate the hillsides of Floyd County. When he arrived, the farmer showed him a bare pasture field. The lumbermen had cut this probably matchless tree, and not a sprout r