ong
with chinquapin questions. According to authorities on the subject of
decadence, we do not care very much about the children in these days. If
some old-fashioned folks still remain, and if these old-fashioned folks
do not take any particular personal interest in the beautiful garden and
lawn trees that America has held out towards us in the chinquapins, they
may at least plant a few of them because of the social standing that
will follow. How so? Well, you see, it's because the parents of elite
children will run over for a little visit in order to find out why the
children do not come home. Then again, we are kind to dumb animals when
raising chinquapins. Squirrels and white-footed mice, crows and blue
jays are full of enthusiasm for the nuts, and they will assume the
responsibility of gathering the crop if the matter is left in their
charge.

This is really a funny country; something of a joke of a country when
you come to think of it. Instead of setting out trees that will become
both useful and beautiful, in accordance with the old Greek ideal of
combining beauty and utility we set out Norway spruces that will make
people hate evergreens in general. We set out poplars and all sorts of
bunches of leaves in our parks and along the highways, instead of trees
still more beautiful that would yield tons of coupon dollars every
autumn. _De gustibus non est disputandum!_

When experimenting with hybridization of chinquapins, I ran across a
phenomenon of new interest to botanists, and quite accidentally. A
number of clusters of pistillate flowers of the bush chinquapin had been
covered with paper bags, but not pollenized because of a shortage of
pollen. An active man with a good sense of neatness and order would have
removed those bags merely for the sake of appearance, but I was lazy
and allowed the bags to remain for two or three weeks. When they were
finally removed, it was found that the branches had set quite full of
fruit, although not so full as other branches that had been pollenized
from oaks. We were evidently dealing with an instance of
parthenogenesis. The flowers that had received oak pollen did not show
any oak parentage later in their progeny, and it was observed in other
experiments in other years that almost any cupuliferous pollen would
start cells of the chinquapin ovary into division and into the
development of fertile nuts, but without inclusion of the pollen cell in
a gamete. For purposes of conven