I do not think I can make myself as clear as I wish I could this morning, but here is the point. If anybody comes to me I can tell him definitely, and I have records in my office to show, what the different varieties are doing and what soil they are growing in. Here in the north where the industry is in its infancy now is the time to start records. When I saw the subject of Professor Hutt's paper, the "Reasons For Our Limited Knowledge as to What Varieties of Nut Trees to Plant," it occurred to me that if you don't now start right in making records, ten years from today you will still have existing one of the principal reasons why you don't know.
MR. KELSEY: I started out four years ago with English walnuts. I read the account of Pomeroy and so I got a half dozen trees from him. They all died. I got five or six trees from Mr. Jones. I think this is the third year and one of those has some nuts on. I have got now about 150 trees planted in regular rows where I am cultivating them. But I was going to say that four years ago I sent to Pomeroy and asked him if he wouldn't send me a few nuts as a sample. He sent me 16. I cracked two of them. Fourteen of them I put in. I didn't know how to put them in so I took a broom handle, punched a hole in the ground and stuck them in the bottom. I never thought I would get any results from them. They came up in July. They did not come up quick. I suppose I had them so deep. I set them out three years ago. Some of them are as high as this room in three years on cultivated land set out in rows. They have never borne any. No one knows how long it takes for a seedling to bear. It may be two years, or five years, or ten.
DR. MORRIS: I want to bear witness on the point that Col. Van Duzee made, the matter of keeping records. The man who keeps good records is a public benefactor because what he learns becomes public property upon the basis of available data. Every one of us should pay attention to that point which Col. Van Duzee has brought out. Unfortunately my records have been kept by my secretaries in shorthand notes and I have had four different secretaries in ten years, and each with different methods of shorthand. They have not had time to write up all the notes, and so I find it difficult to present good nut records when busily occupied with professional responsibilities, which must come first. I had one field filled with young hybrid nut trees. A neighbor's cow got into that field and the boy who came after the cow found her to be refractory. The boy began to pull up stakes with tags marking the different trees and threw them at the cow. Before he got through he had hybridized about forty records of nut trees.