ybrids of this species that have
again been pollinated with resistant Japan varieties. There are at Bell
many seedlings of both these types of great attractiveness and promise.

Five successive generations of selected _Crenata_ seedlings have been
grown since 1904, quite a number producing their first nuts the year
succeeding germination. This unusual precocity is no indication of
merit, as it tends to stunt the trees. The most promising individuals
seldom bear until three or four years old by which time the trees have
attained fair size. No high quality has yet been attained among the nuts
of the pure strains, but it is quite evident where there is a dash of
chinquapin blood. The nuts are, however, large, attractive and excellent
for cooking or roasting, and moreover, ripen uniformly in September and
early October, practically without the aid of frost. As opportunities
for natural infection lessen from the dying out of our stands of native
chestnut the Oriental chestnuts and their hybrids will be more
extensively planted and may experience little difficulty in combating
disease. Owing to the readiness with which seedlings can be grown
abundant new varieties will arise in time, even though they do not now
exist, that will meet all reasonable requirements of the planter and it
is to be anticipated that the production of edible chestnuts will at no
distant day be placed on a stable basis.

Aside from its usefulness as a nut tree the value of our stand of native
chestnuts, though already half destroyed, can scarcely be estimated.
Every one knows the ease with which a healthy chestnut woodland
reproduces itself by sprouts and the extreme value of its timber for
posts, telegraph and telephone poles, for furniture and for tanning
extracts, now made from both bark and wood. We scarcely have a forest
tree as useful, but if some natural handicap, not yet in sight, does not
stay the spread of the blight fungus, our much valued chestnuts appear
to be doomed. A few small colonies of diseased, but living sweet
chestnut trees, numbering scarcely fifty, have been located in New York
City parks and neighboring localities in Long Island, carrying infection
at least eighteen years old, where the accompanying stands have
completely vanished. This affords the single ray of hope amid the
otherwise complete destruction marking the spread of blight. In the hope
that the marked resistance shown by these scarred veterans can be
transmitted see