been pollinated with resistant Japan varieties. There are at Bell many seedlings of both these types of great attractiveness and promise.

Five successive generations of selected Crenata seedlings have been grown since 1904, quite a number producing their first nuts the year succeeding germination. This unusual precocity is no indication of merit, as it tends to stunt the trees. The most promising individuals seldom bear until three or four years old by which time the trees have attained fair size. No high quality has yet been attained among the nuts of the pure strains, but it is quite evident where there is a dash of chinquapin blood. The nuts are, however, large, attractive and excellent for cooking or roasting, and moreover, ripen uniformly in September and early October, practically without the aid of frost. As opportunities for natural infection lessen from the dying out of our stands of native chestnut the Oriental chestnuts and their hybrids will be more extensively planted and may experience little difficulty in combating disease. Owing to the readiness with which seedlings can be grown abundant new varieties will arise in time, even though they do not now exist, that will meet all reasonable requirements of the planter and it is to be anticipated that the production of edible chestnuts will at no distant day be placed on a stable basis.

Aside from its usefulness as a nut tree the value of our stand of native chestnuts, though already half destroyed, can scarcely be estimated. Every one knows the ease with which a healthy chestnut woodland reproduces itself by sprouts and the extreme value of its timber for posts, telegraph and telephone poles, for furniture and for tanning extracts, now made from both bark and wood. We scarcely have a forest tree as useful, but if some natural handicap, not yet in sight, does not stay the spread of the blight fungus, our much valued chestnuts appear to be doomed. A few small colonies of diseased, but living sweet chestnut trees, numbering scarcely fifty, have been located in New York City parks and neighboring localities in Long Island, carrying infection at least eighteen years old, where the accompanying stands have completely vanished. This affords the single ray of hope amid the otherwise complete destruction marking the spread of blight. In the hope that the marked resistance shown by these scarred veterans can be transmitted seedlings have been raised and scions established at Bell from the most promising individuals, and on this slender chance for perpetuating this prized species in its native habitat we must, for the present, rest content.

Recently there has been brought to light in the interior of China a chestnut species that may restore our timber production of this most desirable wood if it should prove immune to disease. Unlike other Old World chestnuts, which form relatively small trees, this species, known as Castanea Vilmoriniana, grows eighty to one hundred feet high with a straight, symmetrical trunk well adapted for all timber uses. The nuts, according to the scant herbarium material that has reached this country, are of little consequence, except for propagation as they are only slightly larger than those of our wild chinquapins. This species is now established at the Arnold Arboretum near Boston, Massachusetts, and scions worked on C. Molissima stocks are now vigorously growing at Bell Experiment Plot, making fine upright shoots. The reaction of C. Vilmoriniana to blight has not been tested owing to the scarcity of material in this country, but it is fervently to be hoped that the species will resist the disease. No infections have occurred in several years exposure either at Boston or at Bell. Should the much desired resistance be established rapid propagation of the species by seed and scions, and an extended test for forestry purposes, would be in order.

The breeding experiments at Bell must be regarded as about the only constructive attempt in existence to replace a most highly prized nut and timber that is being swept from the face of the earth. Unless unforseen natural conditions should stay the ravages of blight our chestnut stands will vanish, most likely within the view of the present generation. Although our progress in finding and developing blight-resistants is not as striking as might be hoped something has been accomplished, and the idea of salvaging useful nut and timber chestnuts from available material and developing better ones than now exist should not be abandoned.

The President: Unless other action is desired this interesting paper will be received and recorded in the proceedings.

Mr. T. P. Littlepage: Mr. President, Members of the Association. I will attempt in a few words to give you some suggestions about your afternoon rambles. There will be a special car assigned exclusively to the nut growers on the tracks at 14th St. and New York Avenue at 12:45, which will take you to Bell Station where you will see Dr. Van Fleet's roses and chestnut orchard. A short walk from there is the old place of Judge Gabriel Duvall, a former Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, member of Congress and a great friend of Thomas Jefferson. The unpublished manuscripts of Jefferson show that he took to Judge Duvall a bundle of "paccan" trees, as he called them. Jefferson was one of our great horticulturists and gave the first complete botanical classification of the pecan. Those three big trees that Jefferson gave Judge Duvall are growing out there today and from them are scores of other small trees. I was very much surprised when I read these notes of Jefferson and in looking through Washington's dairy about the same time I read where he said that Thomas Jefferson gave him a bundle of "paccan" trees. Now those of you who are to visit Mount Vernon on this trip look and you will find that three of the most beautiful trees there are pecan trees. Two of them this year have nuts on them one with a rather full crop and one with a light crop. They are undoubtedly the western or northern pecan. They show that in the character of the nuts and bark. When Jefferson was over in Paris he wrote to his friend Hopkins to send him a box of pecans and told him to send them in sand. Those of you who are going to Paris next summer look around and you may find some of Thomas Jefferson's pecan trees. It was perfectly apparent that he wanted those nuts for planting.

After visiting at Bell Station we will take the car up to my place where there really is not much to see. I have thirty acres there of northern pecan trees, twelve acres two years old and they run all the way up to six years of age. Most of the six-year old trees this year set pecans which dropped off about the middle of the summer. They were all full of catkins. One Busseron tree had fifty pecans on it and a number of Major and Butterick trees had pecans but I do not believe they stuck. I had a Stuart which had a sprinkling of pecans on it and they also fell off. I can show you how not to grow trees. Some of them had no care whatever and some had pretty fair care. You can see dead chestnut trees up there showing that the blight is as bad as Dr. Van Fleet says. We find where they stand in the woods for ten years surrounded by trees with the blight and do not blight and the next year die. So the fact that a tree stands in a nursery row and does not blight does not indicate anything. The only hope we have is the work Dr. Van Fleet is doing.

The President: Upon the same subject we will be glad to hear from Professor Close.

Professor Close: I will just take a few minutes in telling some of the things I have been trying to do at home. My work is necessarily on a very small scale. I am away from home so much of the time that some things I start I