ight of the Office
of Pomological Investigations is now in California doing breeding work,
and I hope his life will be spared so that he can produce a practical
bush almond. My object in throwing this photograph on the screen is to
show you a hillside covered with a food producing plant which has never
yet received the attention of human beings, and yet if studied might
lead to the production of an entirely new type of almond which will
probably grow as far north as the Dakotas.

Jumping from the Dakotas to Florida I want to introduce to you the
Candle Nut or Kukui nut of the Hawaiian Islands which is growing in the
sandy regions of the tropical belt of Florida. If you will read the
literature you will find that it is referred to as a cathartic,
resembling in this respect the castor bean. The problem is whether the
candle nut as grown in Florida is poisonous or not. Prof. Simpson is
growing in his yard in Florida a tree of this Kukui nut and has eaten
these nuts for years, and he just sent me a couple quarts of them from
his tree and I have tried them on my friends with no injurious results
whatever. The thing to look out for is this fetish, this superstition of
poison. This is a very hard-shelled nut, very oily and resembles
somewhat the Brazil nut. If a market can be made for it, and there does
not seem to be any reason why there cannot, there is no reason that they
cannot be grown and they will be grown in southern Florida. That country
which in 1898 was a wilderness is now developing very rapidly as a
region of homes and what they want is plants that they can grow down
there that they can live upon.

On the left is one of these trees which has a good many nuts on it. It
is in Miami, Florida. This is a branch of one of these Kukui nuts in
Miami.

This is probably the least known of any of the nuts. It is the Yeheb
nut. It belongs to the order of Leguminosae and they tell us it is so
sweet, having between 21 and 22 per cent of sugar, that the native Arab
will desert his dates and rich diet, which is the ordinary diet of that
region, and take to the Yeheb whenever it comes into fruit. This Yeheb
shrub grows in the deserts of Italian Somaliland and ought to succeed in
our southwestern country. During the war there was attached to the
Italian Embassy the Italian Explorer Captain Vanutelli, who had the
distinction of having been captured by a savage chief in Abyssinia and
bound for over two months to a black Abyssinian