advantage in planting nut bearing pines rests in the fondness of these
trees for waste places where little else will grow, and they need less
attention perhaps than any other trees of the nut bearing group. For
purposes of convenience in description I shall group all of the conifers
together under the head of pines in this paper, although in botany the
word "Pinus" is confined to generic nomenclature.

Up to the present time we have not even developed our resources to the
point of utilizing good grounds very largely for any sort of nut tree
plantations. In accordance with the canons of human nature men work
hardest, and by preference, with crops which give them small returns for
their labor. Riches from easily raised crops go chiefly to the lazy
folks who don't like work. On the way to this meeting some of you
perhaps noticed near Rye on the west side of the railroad track, a
chicken farm on a side hill and a rich bottom land which had been
ditched and set out to about three hundred willow trees along the ditch
banks. Now if the owner of this property had set out English walnuts in
the place of the willows, each tree at the present time, at a low
estimate, might be bearing five dollars worth of nuts per year per tree,
and I am, sure that would be a much larger income than the owner gets
from his chickens--an income obtained certainly with much less trouble,
because neighbors cannot break in at night and carry off walnut trees of
such size. Two or three weeks from the present time you will observe
people everywhere in this section of the country raking up leaves from
various willows, poplars and maples, when they might quite as well be
raking up bushels of nuts of various kinds instead of just leaves.

I presume that the extensive planting of pine trees for food purposes
will have to wait until we have advanced to the point of putting other
kinds of nut trees upon good ground first. Pines will be employed for
the more barren hillsides when the folks of three hundred years from now
begin to complain of the high cost of living.

Among some thirty or more species of pine trees which furnish important
food supply for various peoples I exhibit nuts from only sixteen species
today, because much of the crop comes from Europe and from Asia. I could
not obtain a larger variety of specimens on account of the present
interest of people in the game which military specialists play wherever
industrious nations have saved up enough