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 of the future housewife. Pots of beechnut butter nearly two thousand years old have recently been unearthed in Poland.

Thus far, scientific agriculture seems to have utterly neglected the beechnut.

This choice dessert nut is gathered wild in southern Turkey and in other widely scattered locations, and for many years it has been an article of commerce. For a long period of time unusual specimens have been propagated by grafting and budding. The great superiority of these few unusual varieties of unknown origin is suggestive of further improvement of the species.

The pistache is a tree having wide climatic adaptation. Commercial varieties have been introduced in the United States from Italy, Sicily, Algeria, Greece, and Afghanistan. Other varieties have been introduced from Palestine, Syria, Libya, and France, and also from China, whose climate differs greatly from that of the other countries just mentioned. The fact that the pistache comes from Afghanistan and from China, as well as from Mediterranean countries, indicates a wide area of possible adaptation in the United States. It is reported thriving at Nucla, Colorado, 5,800 feet altitude, on the grounds of U. H. Walker. (American Nut Journal, June 1926.) Also forty miles west of Wichita, Kansas. (Letter, Merrill W. Isley.)

Merrill W. Isley, an American missionary in southern Turkey, told me that the tree grows wild in an area one hundred miles by one hundred miles near the northeastern corner of the Mediterranean Sea, just north of the present boundary of Syria. There, on the mountains, the pistache tree grows wild as the scrub oak grows wild. It has survived and made profit on what perhaps is the roughest land used for agriculture anywhere in the world. (See Fig. 106.) The tree seems to thrive on thin soils, especially on that underlaid by limestone. It can cling in the crevices of rocks where there is almost no soil to be seen. Mr. Isley tells me of land in Turkey where it is so steep that only goats and men can climb, yet the diligent Armenians