Mr. Reed: Yes, you might say ten thousand.

The Secretary: We have an illustration of the variability of the progeny of a nut in this collection of chestnuts by Mr. Riehl out in Illinois. This is a parent nut, the Rochester, and these others are seedlings from the Rochester, except where marked otherwise, some showing a tendency to revert to the parent, and some promising to be improvements on the parents.

The Chairman: Mr. Secretary, I think we'd better confine ourselves to the hybrid question at the present time.

The Secretary: Are not those all hybrids?

The Chairman: I don't believe any man can tell, unless you get the flowers, because you have the American and European types merging together so perfectly. Some of them show distinctly the European type; others show distinctly the American type. That is what I would expect, however. The practical point is the question of quality. Which one keeps the American quality and which one retains the coarseness of the European type?

Mr. Harris: Speaking of variations of nuts I think it is well known that there is quite a variation in the nuts of the oak. I noticed in one species, michauxii, which is an oak in the South, that its nuts varied a great deal. It is something of the type of the chestnut, the white oak or the rock oaks and it varies a great deal.

I found one on my father's range in New Jersey and also one on the Potomac. The variations extend to the trees as well as the nuts.

The Chairman: The oak tree properly belongs in another tree group and some of the acorns are not only edible, but first-rate. In China there are at least three species found in the markets to be eaten out of hand or roasted. Our white oaks here, some of them, bear very good fruit, from the standpoint of the boy and the pig, anyway, and it seems to me that we may properly include the oaks in our discussion. There would be great range in variation of type from hybridization between oak trees and I have seen a number of oak trees that were evidently hybrids, where the parentage could be traced on both sides, that were held at very high prices by the nurserymen. I asked one nurseryman, who wanted an enormous price for one hybrid oak, why he didn't make ten thousand of those for himself next year? It hadn't occurred to him.

If there is no further discussion in connection with my paper we will have Mr. Littlepage's paper on Nut Promotions.

Mr. Littlepage: Dr. Deming said that he thought it might be time that we have something just a little lighter—that either he should read a paper or I. (Laughter.) Inasmuch as he included himself, I took no offense whatever. The subject I have written on, roughly and hurriedly, is Fraudulent and Uninformed Promoters.

FRAUDULENT AND UNINFORMED PROMOTERS

T. P. Littlepage, Washington, D. C.