make towards developing a
good tree and bringing it into fruiting are wasted.

I know that every one of you appreciates old varieties of corn and just
what has been done in our new varieties of hybrid corn, how hybrid corn
has changed the variety situation. Now it's hybrid this and hybrid that,
because hybrid varieties are generally superb.

Now, at this time in our nut work we are a long way yet from growing
good hybrid varieties, and I feel that there has been an effort on the
part of a lot of people to capitalize on the word "hybrid," because
hybrid corn has been such a success; and we figured that by carrying it
over into other plants, particularly the nut trees, we would get the
same remarkable performance from hybrid nuts that we do from hybrid
corn. But that is not the case.

We will come to that some day in the future, maybe--not in our lifetime,
but we will have hybrid varieties, because, after all, our great
improvements that have come in most of our plants, in corn and in wheat,
and in other plants, have come through the mixing of the genes, or the
characters that we have differing between species.

In our nuts, now, with the exception of hicans, we are still dealing
with pure species, and most, if not quite all, of our hicans are
worthless at the present time, largely because of sterility.

A good variety is the most outstanding thing that a horticulturist can
get or can have, because of the fact that it does have the character in
it which will make good growth. It will set a lot of nuts, it will carry
them through to maturity and it fills them, and if a variety doesn't do
that, it's not a good variety. Then after we get the nuts filled,
cracking quality, eating quality or oil content, and all these things
come next.

Now, this brings us next to the very important consideration of how are
we going to get a new good variety? Well, we can do that by selecting
from seedling nuts, or we can make controlled pollinations, crossing
different varieties, or varieties of different species, planting the
nuts or growing new trees and then selecting out of them those that have
the desirable characters.

But the first thing that we have got to do after we have either selected
the nut or made the hybrid and selected the nut is to evaluate the nut
as to whether it does have the first character, or proper characters,
that we ought to have in the nut. Does the crop ripen evenly? Whether it
hulls readily or comes free