ich are alleged to be of value, when injected into a tree,
are either absolutely worthless or injurious. One man tried to persuade
me that his medication if applied to the cambium layer would be
absorbed, and said that if I would only use it on a few of my trees I
could see for myself. He said it would drive off even the aphides. I
tried it on four trees affected with aphides and found that he told me
the truth. It drove them off, because the trees died and the aphides
left. One tree lived a year before being killed; it was a most insidious
sort of death, but the aphides left that tree. (Laughter.)

Some of the Asiatic chestnuts resist the blight very well. Curiously
enough when grafted upon some of the American chestnuts they then become
vulnerable. Two years ago, from a lot of about one thousand Corean
chestnuts in which there had been up to that time no blight, I grafted
scions on American stump sprouts and about 50 per cent of those grafts
blighted in the next year, showing that the American chestnut sap offers
a pabulum attractive to the Diaporthe, and that is a fact of collateral
value in getting our negative testimony upon the point.

Concerning the question of carrying blight fifty miles, there's no
telling how far birds will fly carrying the spores of Diaporthe upon
their feet. The spores are viscid and adhere to the feet of beetles, or
migratory birds which sometimes make long lateral flights following
food, rather than direct flights north and south. It is quite easy to
imagine birds carrying this Diaporthe over an interval of possibly fifty
miles, making that distance in one night perhaps. Someone may have
carried chestnuts in his pocket to give to his granddaughter fifty miles
away, and in that way carried the blight. If any grafted trees have been
carried fifty miles, or any railroad ties, with a little bark on,
carried fifty miles and then thrown off, it might blight the chestnuts
in that vicinity. One can have as much range of imagination as he
pleases as Longfellow says, There is no limit to the imagination in
connection with questions of spreading the blight of Diaporthe.

Some of the Japanese and Corean chestnuts and some of the Chinese
chestnuts resist blight fairly well. Among my chinkapins, I have the
common _pumila_ and the Missouri variety of _pumila_, which grows in
tree form forty or fifty feet high. I have the alder-leaf chestnut,
which keeps green leaves till Christmas, sometimes till March