r different or reciprocal parents. The principal
combination was a cross of Japanese chestnut with Chinese-American or
American-Chinese, a mixture that in recent years has given excellent
results. This year also, as in the past, our CJA's were crossed with
American chestnut.

[Illustration: Fig. 1. Cross pollinating Chinese chestnuts. Sleeping
Giant Plantation, Hamden, Conn. Trees near left of center and at left,
with drooping catkins, are Japanese-American hybrids. Photo July 13,
1950, by B. W. McFarland.]

~Cooperation with Italy.~ A considerable part of the cross pollination
work this year has been undertaken for the benefit of the Italian
authorities, namely experiment stations at Florence and Rome. This has
been done at the suggestion of the Division of Forest Pathology,
Beltsville, Md., which has been working along the same line.

As is now generally known, the chestnut blight was discovered in Italy
in 1938, and has been making rapid headway in a country 15 percent of
whose forests are in chestnut. To the Italians the chestnut means much
as an article of food. They use the timber also, and the various ages of
coppice growth in many ways[32]. Particular effort this year has been
directed toward the breeding of promising nut-bearing types for them and
especially resistant strains that bear large nuts like the cultivated
European chestnut.

[32] Graves, Arthur Harmount. Breeding Chestnut Trees: Report for 1946
and 1947. 38th Ann. Rept. Northern Nut Growers Assn. p. 85. 1947.

Now, we have found that many of our Chinese chestnuts are practically
immune to the blight. Even if the disease does appear, in most cases it
is in the outer bark only, and is soon healed over. Moreover, the
Chinese chestnut has a large nut, comparable in size to the cultivated
Europeans with pollen from our best Chinese trees, and at the same
successful crosses of the European and Chinese are made.

Last fall, as a result of an article in the _New Haven Register_ by Mr.
A. V. Sizer, I learned of two European chestnut trees of bearing age in
New Haven back yards. So, this summer we have crossed these Europeans
with pollen from our best Chinese trees, and at the same time have taken
the pollen from one of them (in the other the pollen was sterile) and
applied it to the female flowers of our Chinese trees. Most of the
resulting nuts have been sent to the Italian scientists in the hope that
some of them will develop into desirable nut-produc