Walnut
2 of the 7 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Walnut. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a small family of important trees. There are about eight, some say ten, species, all confined to the temperate regions of the northern hemisphere . The black walnut, or walnut, as it is called, is a handsome tree growing to 100 or even 150 feet in height. It is the pride of American forests. Walnut timber was at one time used for fences and was even burned in huge log heaps to get it out of the way. It is a rich, dark wood, now commanding prohibitive prices for furniture, gunstocks, and the like. The butternut is a smaller tree, thirty to one hundred feet high. Its wood is less valuable, but is used for similar purposes. Both woods contain preservative oil and resist decay. The black walnut is found from Minnesota to Texas and eastward. The butternut is more hardy. Both trees bear oily nuts. The walnut is shorter, darker, and rougher than the butternut. How the red squirrel knows which end of the nut to gnaw a hole in, and how he can get the curiously branched meat out through one small hole are questions which puzzle boys. The bark of the butternut is used for tanning, and the husks of its nuts are used to dye homespun a yellowish brown. Northern men who sympathized with the South during the Civil War were often nicknamed "butternuts." English walnuts are a thin shelled nut, less oily, and more generally desired for table use. The English or European walnut is raised extensively in southern Europe and, of late, in California, also in the Middle Atlantic States. The California crop is worth a million dollars a year. Hickory nuts and walnuts are related closely. See Nuts; California English walnut
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a genus comprising seven or eight species of beautiful trees of the natural order Juglandaceæ . All are trees with alternate pinnated leaves, monœcious flowers , and a drupe-like fruit, with a deciduous fleshy husk, which bursts irregularly, and a deeply wrinkled shell (putamen) of two valves, within which is the seed, curiously lobed and wrinkled, with a membranaceous testa and partial dissepiments. The common walnut (J. regia) is a native of Persia and the Himalayas, but has long been cultivated in all parts of the S. of Europe. The date of its introduction is unknown, but it was certainly cultivated by the Romans in the reign of Tiberius. It is a lofty tree of 60 to 90 feet, with large spreading branches. The leaves have two to four pairs of leaflets, and a terminal one . They have a fine however, being much more marked in balsamic odor when bruised; this quality, some trees than in others. An infusion of them has been found useful in scrofula; when bruised and rubbed on the skin they are efficacious in curing itch; and placed in wardrobes they prevent the ravages of moths . The sap is limpid like WALNUT water, but contains much sugar, so that the tree is sometimes tapped for it, like the sugar maple, and the sugar is procured by evaporation; a pleasant kind of wine is also made from it . FORD, an English author, 3d son of