ACORN. The fruit of the oaks, in comthon with other nuts, is called mast, and is much re lied on in timbered countries as food for swine in autumn. The fruit of the live oak is sweet and edible, and is used as food by savages. In all ages savage tribes have used some species of acorns as food. The ancient Greeks and other savage nations so used them before their civilized era, as do the Indians of California at this day. The Indians pound the dry acorns into meal, leach the acridity out by laying the meal on a sand bed and pouring on water, heated with red hot stones in water-tight baskets. It is then formed into a mass by taking up on the palm of the hand and washing off as much of the sand as will readily drop, then rolled in leaves and grass and baked in a hole in the grouud covered by hot embers. The taste is horrible, even to a hungry man, and the smell of the compound, filthily prepared, such as no civilized sense can bear. Yet the Indians consider it nice and fatten on this food. Acorns are the food of quite a number Of herb-eating animals, including the (leer. The ancient • Britons certainly ate them, and the Druids taught that everything produced on the oak, even the mistletoe, was of Divine origin. In the seventh century Ina, the Saxon king, made a law in relation to the fattening of swine on them in the forests. This law was
called a pawnage or pannage. Turner, the ear liest English writer who has written on acorns as food, says: " Oke, whose fruit we call ”corn, or an eycorn (that is, the corn or fruit of an eyke), is hard of digestion, and nourish very much, but they make raw humores. Wherefore we forbid the use of them for meates." In relation to the superstition of the Divine origin of the oak, the Greeks believed it was the first created tree. The Persians and other Oriental nations held it to be of Divine origin, and the Jews held it in great reverence. This unity of sentiment among sav ages is undoubtedly due to the fact that its mast furnished food and its wood strong clubs for primitive warfare, and later, as civilization ad vanced, the value of its timber kept the tradition alive. Above we give cut showing an acorn in the process of germination Unlike the bean, the two halves of the seed do not form the first seed leaves, but these, nevertheless, serve to nourish the plumule, as the young shoots and leaves of a plant are called, the radicle being the young root.