hink that
sometimes the pollen has exercised an influence upon the nuts of the
year. Theoretically it should not do so, but I noticed one case
apparently in which I crossed a chinkapin with a Chinese chestnut, and
the nuts of that year seemed to me to present some of the Chinese
chestnuts' characteristics.

Mr. Hutt: This year I crossed a number of varieties of pecans and in
nearly all those crosses there was to me quite an evident difference in
the nuts. For instance those gathered off certain parts of a pecan tree
of certain varieties, Schley or Curtis or Frotscher, would be typical
nuts, but those hybrids or crosses that I produced were distorted, more
or less misshapen and seemed to have peculiarities; so that when we came
to look over the colony we were in doubt whether they were hand
pollinated hybrids or had been pollinated before we got the blossoms
covered. Many of them evidenced a great number of distortions, and one
of them I remember particularly whose shell was so thin it was just like
a piece of brown paper; and there were several peculiarities that were
quite noticeable in those hand pollinated nuts.

The Chairman: That is a very interesting point. When we come to consider
deformities of nuts we shall find very many cases due to the character
of the pollinization. I crossed the Persian walnut with the shagbark
hickory and had nuts that year of just the sort of which Mr. Hunt
speaks, with shells as thin as paper. One could crush them with the very
slightest pressure of the finger. The shells were not well developed.
Unfortunately the mice happened to get at all of those nuts. I don't
know if they were fertile or not. The kernels were only about half
developed. I should look for deformity in these nuts rather than a
taking on of the type of one parent over the other, the idea being based
on theoretical biological considerations. We had last year a photograph
of a tree in California which apparently was a cross, a very odd
cross--does any one remember about that California tree?

Mr. Wilcox: It was a cross between Juglans Californica and the live oak.

The Chairman: Both the foliage and the nuts were very remarkable and
pertained to characters of these two trees. Such a cross to my mind
would be wholly unexplainable excepting on the ground recently brought
out by Loeb and his followers in crossing the lower forms of animal life
and finding that the cell membrane of the egg, if destroyed, will allow
of ve