CALIFORNIA WALNUT (_Juglans californica_) is a small tree confined to California, and pretty close to the coast, though it grows in Eldorado county. It is most abundant within twenty or thirty miles of tidewater. In the southern part of the state it ascends to an elevation of 4,000 feet. It prefers the banks of streams and the bottoms of canyons where the soil is moist, but it will grow in dry situations. Trees occur singly or in small groups. Their average size is fifteen or twenty feet high, and eight or ten inches in diameter; but trees occasionally are sixty feet high and eighteen inches through. The leaves are small, measuring from six to nine inches in length, with from nine to seventeen leaflets. Nuts are about half the size of eastern black walnuts. The kernel is edible. The wood is heavier than black walnut, and somewhat lighter in color. Otherwise the two woods are much alike, except in strength and stiffness. In these the California wood is inferior. It has not been reported for any use, but it is suitable for a number of purposes, provided logs of sufficient size could be had. The trunk, in addition to being small, is usually short. The tree is intolerant of shade, and is not often found in forests. It grows rapidly and will attain a diameter of fifteen inches in twenty years or less; but it apparently does not live long. Its principal usefulness in California is as a shade tree, and as a stock in nurseries on which to graft English walnut. [Illustration] SHAGBARK HICKORY [Illustration: SHAGBARK HICKORY] SHAGBARK HICKORY (_Hicoria Ovata_) Twelve species of hickory grow in the United States, all east of the Rocky Mountains. None grow anywhere else in the world, as far as known. They were widely dispersed over the northern hemisphere in prehistoric times. The records of geology, written by leaf prints in the rocks, tell of forests of hickory in Europe, and even in Greenland, probably a hundred thousand or more years ago, and certainly not in times that can be called recent. No records there later than the ice age have been found. This leads to the presumption that the sheet of ice which pushed down from the North and covered the larger portions of Europe and North America, overwhelmed the hickory forests, and all others, as far as the southern limit of the ice’s advance. In Europe the hickory was utterly destroyed, and it never returned after the close of the reign of ice; but America was more fortunate. The ice sheet pushed little farther in its southward course than the Ohio and Missouri rivers, and forests south of there held their ground, and they slowly worked their way back north as the ice withdrew. Hickory recovered part but not all of its lost ground in America, for it is now found no farther north than southern Canada, which is more than a thousand miles from its old range in Greenland.