“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 Ohio variety which I had grafted on butternut roots.  The tree had been bearing for three or four years but this was the first year the nuts had matured.  During their bearing period, these black walnuts had gradually changed in appearance, becoming elongated and very deeply and sharply corrugated like butternuts although they still retained the black walnut flavor.  Because of this mixture of characteristics, the government experts had great difficulty in identifying the variety, although the Ohio was well known to them.

Another variety of black walnut, the Thomas, I have also known to be influenced by the butternut stock on which it was grafted, when in 1938, one of my trees bore black walnuts whose meat had lost its characteristic flavor and assumed that of the butternut.

[Illustration:  A—­Genuine original Ohio Black Walnut from parent tree

B—­Nut produced by grafting Ohio on Butternut]