lture possible in those sections of the country that
are not too cold for peaches.

[Footnote A: Approved by the Director of the New York State Agricultural
Experiment Station for publication as Journal Paper No. 49.]

Notes on Hickories

_By_ A. B. ANTHONY

_Sterling, Illinois_

I am satisfied only when I am trying for the best, and the best to me in
nuts is the hickory. For the past nine years in the nut season, and
sometimes out of it, for nut shucks tell their story, I have been
combing my own territory with hopes of finding some hickories more worth
while. About twenty miles westward from my home brings one to the
Mississippi River. One hundred years ago most of this twenty mile land
tract was covered with timber, more or less interspersed with hickories,
most of which have been cut down. Along the Mississippi there were then
shellbarks and shagbarks, together with pecans, the latter of which I
understand are all gone now. My own location was originally prairie land
out of which one could not go in any direction without passing through a
woodland tract. These nearer woods held in nut trees more shagbarks than
of any other nut variety, with the bitter hickory nut coming in second
place. As I thought about it, given a good enough tree, it seemed to me
the hickory was the greatest one we could grow. Grandfather had let pass
his opportunity to save any choice ones. So had my father. And if the
neighborhood zest was overfreighted with purpose to find such trees I
had not found it out. It looked to me like a worthwhile endeavor not to
let this neglect go further, even though chance finds were much lessened
from what they probably once were.

Having three or four kinds of hickories is no doubt a fine thing for us.
Nature cannot manage nearly so well with them as can man, but she makes
something of a hit once in a while. More than we think for, perhaps, in
the hickories we are using to graft from, there is quite likely, in the
sizeable shagbarks, something besides shagbark. Their distinctiveness,
for which we selected them, is due to a fortunate, unlike cross bringing
out their exceptional characteristics. What most hinders progress is
quite conceivably a sort of swamped unchangeableness. That is very
possibly the likely ailment we've got in our hazelnuts. There were no
three or four kinds of them scattered more or less everywhere about the
country with which nature could make chance crosses as with hickories