shels, the
persimmon breaks with fruit.

Europe shows us an agriculture making considerable use of crop-yielding
trees other than the ordinary fruits. Mr. C. F. Cook, of the Department
of Agriculture, is the authority for the statement that Mediterranean
agriculture began on the basis of tree crops, and there are now about
twenty-five such crops in the Mediterranean basin. The oak tree
furnishes five, cork bark, an ink producing gall which enters into the
manufacture of all our ink, the Valonia, or tannin-yielding acorn, which
is an important export from the Balkan states; the truffle worth several
million dollars to France; and lastly the acorn. In the Balaeric Isles,
I am informed, certain acorns are more prized than chestnuts and the
trees yielding them are grafted like apples, and the porker is turned
out to make his living picking up acorns where they fall, and enriching
his diet with a special kind of fig grown in the same way for his use.
We Americans are too industrious; we insist upon putting a pig in a pen
and then waiting upon him. The pistachio, the walnut, the filbert and
the chestnut are all important tree crops in parts of the Mediterranean
countries and many American travelers have probably seen the chestnut
orchards of France and Italy, which I have found by examination are able
to make the rough and unplowable mountain-side, bristling with rocks, as
valuable as the level black prairies of Illinois.

The natural objection may be raised that the utilization of so much
hilly land in fruit and nut-yielding trees will give such supplies of
new food that people will refuse to use them. The above objection is
well founded; but swine, sheep and poultry eat what is given them. I
have an example of a farmer of Louisiana, who planted a hillside to
mulberry trees. The mulberries held the ground in place by their roots
and dropped their black harvest to the ground through three months of
summer, and the hogs gathered them up and converted them into pork worth
$12 an acre, without any effort on the part of the owner. The mulberry
area in the United States is probably close to a million square miles.
Over most of the region south of Mason and Dixon's Line the persimmon is
a hated tree weed; yet it stands by the millions in fields and fence
rows, fairly bending down with a full crop of fruit every other year,
which is much sought after by the opossum and other wild animals, and
eaten when possible by the American por