e quality of the Paragon nuts even at the expense of size. The
resulting seedlings were grown at Little Silver, New Jersey, and rapidly
ran up into good-sized trees, coming into bearing twelve years later. In
fruit and tree characters they proved a complete blend of the parent
species, the nuts being double the size of the wild parent and of sweet,
rich quality. The trees were very shapely and bid fair to become
extremely productive but a year or two later were all attacked by the
dreaded blight or bark disease, then spreading from its original
starting point in Long Island. The work of destruction was very rapid
and by the third year all were hopelessly crippled, but a few
individuals continued to send up suckers as late as 1916.

The success of this pollination experiment encouraged the writer to
attempt breeding the dwarf early-bearing chinquapin with the
large-fruited foreign varieties in the hope of securing hybrids with
nuts of fair size and good quality that might come quickly into bearing.
As the chinquapin does not naturally grow in Northern New Jersey, and
plants were rarely offered by nurserymen, recourse was had to growing
them from seed and a quantity of newly collected nuts were furnished by
a friend in Washington in 1899. It required three years time to bring
the seedlings into fruit and it was not until 1903 that a start was
actually made in the work of hybridization. A selection was made of a
compact dwarf bush that bore very sweet nuts of a good size for the
species and gave promise, which was later fulfilled, of becoming very
prolific. The male, or staminate tassels were carefully removed each day
before maturity and, to ward off undesired foreign pollen, a cloth tent
was used to cover the bush in addition to bagging many of the flowering
branches. Pollen for crossing was secured from Paragon and Numbo, of the
European species, and of several named varieties of Japan chestnut
including Parry's Giant, Killen and Hale, and in addition a few blooms
were intentionally fertilized with pollen from local sweet chestnut
trees. Nearly one hundred hybrid seedlings resulted from the work in two
succeeding seasons, some of which came into bearing in 1908, just as the
_Endothia_ blight began to invade New Jersey. The hybrids between the
chinquapins and native and European chestnuts were quickly infected, but
those with Japan varieties appeared far more resistant. All work with
the susceptible native and Europeans c