THE PRESIDENT: Inasmuch as the author of the paper is not present to answer questions, the only thing that may be done is to ask further contributions of knowledge in the same field. Has anyone any contribution to make?
MISS LOUISE LITTLEPAGE: I would like to ask how long the chestnut tree has been able to live with the blight?
DR. METCALF: Do you refer to the Asiatic ones or to the ones that grow here in America?
DR. METCALF: It is almost impossible to answer that question because you have to define just what you mean by "living." If the chestnut tree is attacked first or early on the trunk, it is girdled and dies shortly, but if it is attacked first on the top there develop conditions like what is shown in this picture (showing photograph). I am not certain that you can see these bunches of suckers a little way up the tree. Now those trees will sometimes exist four or five years. I can say safely that I have seen trees last five years.
DR. MORRIS: I can add three years to that.
THE PRESIDENT: If there is no further discussion, we may adjourn.
Meeting called to order by the President.
THE PRESIDENT: To my mind nut growing is part of a larger field, a field of conservation, one which is going to develop a whole new series of tree crops, of which the nuts are but a part.
Agriculture is usually symbolized by a picture showing a man, a plow, and a sheaf of wheat. I would make the symbolization double by adding to it some kind of a nut tree in fruit. I have long had a vision of waving, sturdy, fruitful trees yielding nuts and other valuable fruit, and standing on our hilly and rocky land where now the gully and other signs of poverty, destruction and desolation gape at us. This vision of the fruitful tree also extends to the arid lands, there also vastly increasing our productive areas. Beyond a doubt the tree is the greatest engine of production nature has given us, and in its ability to yield harvests without soil injury on rough, rocky, and steep lands, and on arid lands, carries the possibility of the approximate doubling of the area of first-class cropping land in the United States, also probably in many other countries.
Twenty-one years ago this spring I began in a small way to bring into reality this vision of the tree-covered fruitful hills, although my interest in the matter goes back at least four years further to the time when I filled my pockets with the large grafted European chestnuts grown along his lanes by the late Edwin Satterthwaite, of Jenkintown, Pa.