mber of acres if those few did well, being men of a conservative sort.
Men of that sort are the ones we want to have in our Association. We
want to have men who will buy four trees, and if they do well, set out
four hundred acres. That is what a great many men have had in mind in
buying two, four or six trees of any one kind; they want to try them
out. That is the wise way, the conservative way, the truly progressive
way. If we are going to have very large numbers of any one kind of
chestnut set out, we must make a statement of the dangers, so that men
may be forewarned. If they set them out without warning and are
disappointed, they drop the entire subject and go to raising corn and
hogs; and then, to save trouble, turn these hogs into the corn and get
to doing things in the easiest way, rather than carry on the complicated
methods of agriculture that belong to the spirit of the present time. I
would like to know if many efforts are being made toward breeding immune
kinds. I am at work on that myself.

Mr. Pierce: Our Commission has recently gotten, I think, about fifty
pounds of Chinese chestnuts of several kinds, which they expect to plant
for experiment. Besides that they have made some other arrangements of
which I know very little. This investigation will take years. The
Commission has been compelled to devote itself to so many lines of work
that I am afraid this question has not been given the attention it might
have had. I think in the future there will be a good deal done along
that line.

Two of us have been given the title of tree surgeons, and we work, or
make arrangements to have someone else work, sometimes the scout, in the
orchards throughout the state. I have a list of two hundred owners of
cultivated chestnut trees that I got in the last month from various
sources. Anyone in Pennsylvania who has a cultivated chestnut tree, can
send a postal card, get one of us out to examine the tree and see
whether it is blighted, and we will demonstrate what can be done in the
way of treating it. I have done that right along in the last two months.
If it is only a single tree I cut out all I can myself.

The Chairman: There are two distinct questions; first, the chestnut as a
food tree, and second, as a timber tree. Your work has been chiefly with
the chestnut as a timber tree?

Mr. Pierce: No, mine has been mostly on the lawn, so that it is for
nuts.

Experiments made on one or two species of Japanese chestnuts