ester. But he usually sets nothing
but wood trees, which at the end of fifty or a hundred or a hundred and
fifty years, we can cut down, and which, during the intervening time,
have done nothing but cast shade, drop leaves and retain the soil. My
doctrine is that the potentially greatest crop-producing plants are not
those on which we now depend for our food, but are the trees,; that the
greatest engines for production are not the grasses, but the trees. Our
agriculture is an inheritance from the savage, and the savage found that
he could do better with annual grains than he could with nut trees,
because he didn't know how to improve the nut crop by selection of the
trees, while there came involuntarily an improvement in the other crops.
No man today knows the parentage of some of the cultivated plants and
grains on which we now depend. Thus we came down to the present day of
science, with the purely chance discoveries of savages as the main
dependence of mankind for the basis of agriculture.

We have within a decade discovered the laws of plant breeding. We know a
good deal more about it now than ever before and are in a position to
start about it very deliberately and with a reasonable certainty that we
are going to get certain combinations of qualities if we keep at it long
enough. Thus the hickory and walnut offer perfect marvels of
possibilities. Look around on these tables and see the size of some of
these things. There are hickory nuts 1-1/4 inch long and there are
shagbarks as full of meat as pecans and probably quite as good. There
are in Kentucky, I am told, hickory nuts that you can take in your
fingers and crush. Here we have the pecan, this great big shellbark from
Indiana, the shagbark from the North, and the thin shell nuts from
Kentucky. Now hybridize these and I think, if you work at it long
enough, you will get a tree that will have all those good qualities.

The wonderful black walnut is a tree of hardiness, and the delicious
Persian or English walnut is a nut of acceptable form. The pair offers
splendid possibilities in their hybrid progeny.

We have fruits thus far recognized as of little value which offer great
possibilities as forage producers. The mulberry bears from June to
September and the persimmon from September till March and the pig
harvests them himself.

We have the possibility of a brand-new agriculture, depending not upon
grains, but upon tree crops, provided someone will breed the