align="right">30.60

  Advertising 1920 Nut Contest (not all paid before Oct. 1)   30.60 30.60     —— —— ——     $ 30.75 $560.47 $591.22 591.22   $ 30.75 $560.47 $591.22   Balance on hand Oct. 1, 1920       591.22 Special hickory prize       25.00 Life membership       25.00 For regular expenses       25.26         ——         $666.48

Verified by

C. P. CLOSE,
C. A. REED,
Auditing Committee.

The above are records of receipts and expenditures for 10 months and are about 82% of those for the period covered by the previous report, 2 years 3 months. There has been an earnest attempt to carry on the work of the Secretary-Treasurer in a more aggressive manner than before. A bulletin aiming to give up to date information on nut growing, Bulletin No. 5, has been issued and has gone well. While it has been sold, no attempt has been made to make money on it but simply to make it pay its way and apparently it is going to do that and assist in spreading information about the work of the Association.

Sixty-six new members have joined the Association since the date of the last meeting, making 476 since organization, of which we have 199, and of whom 277 have dropped out. A few former members have joined since the date of the last report which apparently accounts for the strange fact that increase in membership (128 to 199) is greater than the number of new members.

Following out the plan outlined at the Battle Creek Convention, the work of the Secretary-Treasurer has begun to be divided, the undersigned taking the duties of Treasurer and the Nut Contests and Dr. Deming taking the Conventions and the work of the Secretary proper until the expected action of the present convention shall formally divide the work of the Secretary-Treasurer and create the offices of Secretary and Treasurer.

Respectfully submitted,

WILLARD G. BIXBY.
Secretary-Treasurer.

The President: This is a very good report, complete in every detail, and unless other action is desired, it will be received and recorded in the minutes of the meeting.

Mr. Reed, you are chairman of the committee that had in charge the tree-planting bill in order that it might be made uniform throughout the country. Have you a report to make?

Mr. Reed: Mr. President, the committee members have been over that individually but have not had an opportunity to discuss it together. If a full report can be had a little later I think that would be more satisfactory. So far as I have been able to go into it the law seems to about cover the ground. I could not make any suggestions as to how it could be improved. I happen to know that the author of the bill, who is our president, has been called upon by several other states to discuss such a law for those states, and I think he is in the best position to tell us if there are any holes in it. If we can have the consent of the house we will defer a full report until we can discuss the matter with our president and with our committee as a whole.

The President: We will take that course unless there are objections.

The communications received by the acting secretary will be filed and printed in the proceedings. If there are no vice-presidents present who are prepared to make reports that order will be passed. At this time should come the appointment of committees but I think it would be well to defer that business until we can consult as to the membership of the committees. The next in order will be some remarks by Mr. Littlepage about the proposed afternoon excursion.

The Acting Secretary: The speakers are Dr. Van Fleet, Mr. Littlepage and Professor Close. I have here the resume of Dr. Van Fleet and I think that it would be better perhaps to read the report of Dr. Van Fleet at once as it may have some bearing on the remarks of Mr. Littlepage and Professor Close.

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CHESTNUT WORK AT BELL EXPERIMENT PLOT

Dr. Walter Van Fleet, Glendale, Maryland

Our breeding work with chestnuts began as far back as 1894 when pistillate blooms of the Paragon variety, then a novelty just coming into use, were dusted with pollen from a native sweet chestnut bearing good-sized nuts. The Paragon stigma were protected from the influence of other pollen by bagging and gave a good set of fruits. The idea was to improve the quality of the Paragon nuts even at the expense of size. The resulting seedlings were grown at Little Silver, New Jersey, and rapidly ran up into good-sized trees, coming into bearing twelve years later. In fruit and tree characters they proved a complete blend of the parent species, the nuts being double the size of the wild parent and of sweet, rich quality. The trees were very shapely and bid fair to become extremely productive but a year or two later were all attacked by the dreaded blight or bark disease, then spreading from its original starting point in Long Island. The work of destruction was very rapid and by the third year all were hopelessly crippled, but a few individuals continued to send up suckers as late as 1916.

The success of this pollination experiment encouraged the writer to attempt breeding the dwarf early-bearing chinquapin with the large-fruited foreign varieties in the hope of securing hybrids with nuts of fair size and good quality that might come quickly into bearing. As the chinquapin does not naturally grow in Northern New Jersey, and plants were rarely offered by nurserymen, recourse was had to growing them from seed and a quantity of newly collected nuts were furnished by a friend in Washington in 1899. It required three years time to bring the seedlings into fruit and it was not until 1903 that a start was actually made in the work of hybridization. A selection was made of a compact dwarf bush that bore very sweet nuts of a good size for the species and gave promise, which was later fulfilled, of becoming very prolific. The male, or staminate tassels were carefully removed each day before maturity and, to ward off undesired foreign pollen, a cloth tent was used to cover the bush in addition to bagging many of the flowering branches. Pollen for crossing was secured from Paragon and Numbo, of the European species, and of several named varieties of Japan chestnut including Parry's Giant, Killen and Hale, and in addition a few blooms