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 5. The acorn has been used as a standard food for ages.

6. The food value of the acorn (pp. 180, 189) shows that it stands well in the class of nutrients. Historically, it has been a food for ages of the squirrel, opossum, raccoon, and bear. Among the four-footed brethren the hog, above all, might almost be called an acorn animal. For untold ages he has lived in the forests, from Korea to Spain. In the autumns he has larded himself up with a layer of fat to carry him through the winter. A food for man, the acorn has certainly been used for unknown centuries in many lands. It is still being used as food by man, his beasts, and the wildlings.

As the pioneer farmers of Pennsylvania pushed aside the flowing stream of oil from their springs so that animals might drink water, so the modern world has pushed aside this good food plant, the oak tree.

There is a strip of hills from New England to Minnesota, from New England to Alabama, from Alabama to Ohio, from Ohio to Missouri, and from Missouri down to Texas. On these hills men have been making their living by growing wheat, corn, oats, clover, and grass. Yet I am confident that in every county there are oak trees of such productivity that if made into orchards they would in any decade yield more food for beast and possibly for man than has been obtained on the average in any country in any similar period on the hill farms of this wide region.

The oak tree is productive. Down in Algarve, the southernmost province of Portugal, I heard of an ilex that bore 1,200 liters (35¼ liters equal 1 bushel) of acorns. The definiteness of the report was pleasing to the ear of one in search of facts, and the size of the yield was surprising. I went to see the tree. It stood alone in an unfenced outer yard at the edge of the village of St. Bras. The branches had a reach of only fifty-one feet. By long and devious methods I cross-questioned the owner, a widow of sixty. She always told the same story, and the neigh-