An experience I recently had is quite suggestive
of this. I wished to buy some furniture in either black walnut or
mahogany and I was hesitating between them. Noting my uncertainty, the
salesman suggested a suite of French walnut. My curiosity and interest
were immediately aroused. I had not only been raising many kinds of
walnut trees, but I had also run through my own sawmill, logs of walnut
and butternut. I felt that I knew the various species of walnut very
thoroughly. So I suggested to him:
"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.
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