CASTANEA

(Castana,a city of The aly.) A genus of trees or shrubs, related to the oak, and producing for fruit the seed-like nuts called chesnuts in this country. The common Spanish chesnuts, of which upwards of 20,000 bushels are apnually imported from the south of Europe, are the fruit of C. vesca; a much smaller nut is obtained in North America from the C. pumila, or the Chinquapin chesnut. The timber of the common Spanish chesnut is good and durable, more so than that of the oak, when the latter is young; but it is a mistake to suppose that the ancient roofs and beams occasionally found in buildings of the Norman era, and which carpenters call chesnut, are the wood of this tree. Such instances all belong to the kind of oak called Quercus se ilifiora. The genus Castanea differs from Quercus, among other things, in having the nuts enclosed in a spiny closed-up cup, instead of a shallow open one; but in the East Indies, where both oaks and chesnuts a ume very remarkable forms, the two approach each other sometimes so nearly in this particular, that it is difficult to distinguish them. [s. 212]