closely related,
both belonging to the family _Juglans_. The black walnut is known as
_Juglans nigra_ and the butternut or white walnut as _Juglans cinera_.
The similarity between the trees is so pronounced that the most
experienced horticulturist may confuse them if he has only the trees in
foliage as his guide. An experience I recently had is quite suggestive
of this. I wished to buy some furniture in either black walnut or
mahogany and I was hesitating between them. Noting my uncertainty, the
salesman suggested a suite of French walnut. My curiosity and interest
were immediately aroused. I had not only been raising many kinds of
walnut trees, but I had also run through my own sawmill, logs of walnut
and butternut. I felt that I knew the various species of walnut very
thoroughly. So I suggested to him:

"You must mean Circassian or English walnut, which is the same thing. It
grows abundantly in France. You are wrong in calling it French walnut,
though, because there is no such species."

He indignantly rejected the name I gave it, and insisted that it was
genuine French walnut.

"Perhaps," I advised him, "that is a trade name to cover the real
origin, just as plucked muskrat is termed Hudson seal."

That, too, he denied. We were both insistent. I was sure of my own
knowledge and stubborn enough to want to prove him wrong. I pulled a
drawer from the dresser of the "French walnut" suite and asked him to
compare its weight with that of a similar drawer from a black walnut
suite nearby. Black walnut weighs forty pounds per cubic foot, while
butternut weighs only twenty-five. He was forced to admit the difference
and finally allowed my assertion to stand that "French walnut" was
butternut, stained and finished to simulate black walnut. Since it would
have been illegal to claim that it was black walnut, the attractive but
meaningless label of "French walnut" had been applied. Although it is
less expensive, I do not mean to imply that butternut is not an
excellent wood for constructing furniture. It ranks high in quality and
is probably as durable as black walnut. I do say, though, that it was
necessary for me to know both the species names and the relative weights
of each wood to be able to distinguish between them indisputably.

An instance in which the nuts themselves were useless for purposes of
identification occurred when I sent some black walnuts to the Division
of Pomology at Washington, D. C. These were the Ohi