chestnut groves and we find these groves anywhere from twenty-five to one hundred years old. They are very valuable property for the reason that when old there are many cords of wood to the acre, and chestnut wood is valuable.

They have a disease over there called inky root consequently new plantings have largely ceased, though there are some going on. A great reason for planting is that timber means an increase in the value of land. A man who has an old chestnut orchard has land that is worth two hundred dollars an acre for wood alone and the temptation is very strong to sell off the timber and get the money, which process is going on faster than the setting of new orchards. These orchards are on high class agricultural land.

It is quite different in Corsica; the country there is very broken and rough. Some of the hills range up to 6,000 feet, and for a belt of 2,000 feet the chestnut forests are continuous and villages numerous. This island supports a dense population. The principal industry consists of gathering the chestnuts, and for a few weeks the people are very busy putting them away for the year's supply and sending them to market. I stopped at the home of the mayor of a little town and he went back in the barn where he had a bin full of dried chestnuts. He fed some of them to my horse. It is their one crop. Many people have nothing but twenty or thirty or forty acres of chestnuts and a little garden—a little garden made by retaining walls making a terrace that must be tilled by hand. That is the whole sustenance of the people. The value of the land is usually estimated on a tree basis, and very seldom put on a land basis. The value of land covered with trees is from two hundred to three hundred dollars an acre, and land along side of this without trees may be worth but ten dollars. The value of the chestnut trees for wood forms a large part of the sale value. There is some good pasture under these trees.

The renewing of these groves is perfectly systematic. The old trees, having attained their full size, meet overhead and right alongside of them are planted new trees, which under such circumstances make a very poor growth. The young tree may get as high as this room in ten or fifteen years, and the old tree being worth ten or fifteen dollars, is then cut down (in that country if you want money cut down a chestnut tree). The young tree takes the place very soon, and once established a chestnut orchard lasts indefinitely. Sometimes they plant the young tree beside the old one, ten or fifteen years before the old tree is to be cut down.

The contrast between the populous villages of Corsica and like portions of the Appalachian hillsides is striking. The inhabitants of the latter cut down everything, plant corn and in two or three seasons the rain simply carries the earth away and the farm has to be abandoned. In contrast to that the orchards of Corsica have been there for many centuries. I asked one man how long this thing had been going on. He said "two hundred, three hundred, five hundred, one thousand years, always." Nobody knows when they began to grow chestnuts. How the land continues to grow them is more than I can understand. As an example of permanent agriculture, that has everything I have ever heard of beaten out. Those people had not fertilized the trees, as it would be a physical impossibility to carry anything up those slopes; everything comes down. They have been taking off wood and nuts always, nothing has gone back. I have not been present at harvest time but I have consulted with the representatives of the Department of Agriculture in France and they tell me this land produces a ton to three thousand pounds to the acre, with the big years doubling that and the little years halving it. This without taking anything away from the land apparently. The land is as good as when they began, and is supporting a dense population and has for centuries.

Another forage nut which struck me as even more important than the chestnut, because of its much wider possibility in America, is the acorn. I have been through considerable areas in Portugal where they didn't care whether they had a cork tree or an oak. Land with such trees is worth from one hundred to one hundred and fifty dollars per acre. They assured me that the acorn oak forest was as valuable as the cork forest. Some of this land is wheat land. They will let an oak tree stand right in the middle of a field where the cultivation of the ground improves the tree. After the wheat harvest the hogs fatten on the acorns.

The evergreen oak of southern Europe is highly prized for its acorns. I have seen large areas of bearing trees. I have been told time and again that they bear at a comparatively early age. The oak is capable of grafting, about as easily as the chestnut. I have seen them grafted, all the way from those of this spring up to three hundred years old. The number of trees grafted is small, but that in no way affects the possibilities. Certain varieties are prized as much as chestnuts, or even more, and the price of acorns is set by the price of chestnuts, just as the price of cornmeal sets the price for chestnut meal. I never got crop records for a solid acre of oak trees, but the performance of individual trees gives rise to the belief that the acorn crop in Europe and America is worthy of careful study. I saw a tree—a single tree—that I was assured bore more than twelve hundred quarts in a single year, thirty-seven bushels. It is hard to get the yield in a large forest, but this tree was alone. Its sweep was seventeen yards, its yearly production seemed to average over twenty bushels, which was worth as much as an acre of corn in any of our states. Wherever I found an isolated tree, I found its production to be surprisingly large, and I got my information from a variety of sources. It seemed to be one of the most important forage trees.

As to the Persian walnut, it is reported to be a small nut of almost no value in its wild state. It grows around the world between the belt of the orange and the belt of the white pine. It is unknown as a crop in large areas in Europe, where it might be grown successfully. In Italy there is only an occasional tree, and it is not grown much in Portugal or Spain.

It has centers in Europe as crops have in the United States and for the same reason—someone started the industry. The activities of Mr. Pomeroy have stimulated its growth in his immediate locality. When any one succeeds in a certain line, we find people about him taking up the same line and they conclude that this product can only be produced in that particular locality. This is usually not so at all. The thing that happened was that some one showed them that this soil would produce this thing. Near Naples there is a walnut boom. The value of the walnut as a crop is shown by the fact that market gardens producing three crops a year under irrigation are being planted to English walnuts. I have been told time and again that this is a very profitable crop. In this walnut district they have planted whole hillsides to olives and walnuts alternately, sometimes mixed up, sometimes twenty acres solid. In some places they can only be cultivated with the hoe, a very distinctly un-American job, and yet the English walnut seems to pay the people under those conditions of labor. It is spreading over that peninsula and you find it spreading in the lowlands. They trim the tree up to twenty-five feet, so that teams can drive below.

There are two important walnut areas in France; at one place an old crank named Mayette about two hundred years ago found a good walnut and he grafted some and planted out an acre or two, and his neighbors planted some, especially when his acre or two began to grow, with the result that the territory around that old man's planting is the center of the production of the Grenoble walnut. A little strip, on the