new series of
tree crops, of which the nuts are but a part.

PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS.

DR. J. RUSSELL SMITH.

Agriculture is usually symbolized by a picture showing a man, a plow,
and a sheaf of wheat. I would make the symbolization double by adding to
it some kind of a nut tree in fruit. I have long had a vision of waving,
sturdy, fruitful trees yielding nuts and other valuable fruit, and
standing on our hilly and rocky land where now the gully and other signs
of poverty, destruction and desolation gape at us. This vision of the
fruitful tree also extends to the arid lands, there also vastly
increasing our productive areas. Beyond a doubt the tree is the greatest
engine of production nature has given us, and in its ability to yield
harvests without soil injury on rough, rocky, and steep lands, and on
arid lands, carries the possibility of the approximate doubling of the
area of first-class cropping land in the United States, also probably in
many other countries.

Twenty-one years ago this spring I began in a small way to bring into
reality this vision of the tree-covered fruitful hills, although my
interest in the matter goes back at least four years further to the time
when I filled my pockets with the large grafted European chestnuts grown
along his lanes by the late Edwin Satterthwaite, of Jenkintown, Pa.

My first essay at nut tree cropping was short but not sweet. I planted
an acre and a half of Persian walnuts, seedlings being the only things
then to be found. There being no one within my reach to guide me much,
if any, I bought such seedlings as were to be had from a New Jersey
nurseryman. I mulched them, and saw them each year grow less and less
until the third season they disappeared. I have, however, some survival
from this attempt in the form of black walnuts, which I had the
foresight to plant as nuts immediately beside the Persian walnuts when
they were planted as trees. Some of these walnuts are now quite sturdy
young trees ready to be top-worked to some good strain.

My second attempt was the Paragon chestnut. In 1897 I started in on a
100-acre tract on the Blue Ridge Mountains, near Bluemont, Va., much of
it too rocky for any cultivated crop, but admirably fitted to native
chestnuts, and covered with a perfect stand. I had a good many acres
well established, when, in 1908, the chestnut blight convinced me that
further extension was perilous. My orchard has since been given over to
the Departme