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 greatly. The Chinese trees have been frozen out in some places, and in other plantings nearby they have not. Local conditions often combine with the natural variation of individual trees to cause this variation in survival. For example, the chestnut is easily injured by wet ground in places where the pecan would rejoice and wax fat and green. In my more than twenty years' experimentation with the Chinese species I have, on two occasions, planted rows of them in places where a portion of the row was in well drained ground and another portion stood in ground only two or three feet lower yet not well drained. Blight ravaged the trees with the wet feet. The trees forty feet away on the well-drained soil missed it almost entirely.

We are now in a rapid process of testing individual trees, any one of which may become a variety such as the Abundance, the Connecticut Yankee, the U. S. Department of Agriculture No. 7930, now christened "Nanking," also the Meiling and Kuling and many others that will follow.

The variation of individual trees within the species is attested to in New Jersey Experiment Station Bulletin No. 717, 1945, which reports the planting of 150 Chinese chestnut seedlings in orchard form, in 1926. The bulletin reads as follows:

A number of distinct tree forms developed, and a few of the trees developed true central leaders and have formed a distinctly upright type. . . . After several crops had been produced, marked differences were noted in the regularity of bearing and in the productiveness of individual trees. . . . The variations were at least as great as among an equal number of apple seedlings. . . . Since the trees have come into bearing, a few produce annually, many biennially, and still others are uncertain as to regularity of bearing and quantity of nuts produced. It thus appears that an orchard of unselected Chinese chestnut seedlings may be very variable in production and consequently may be disappointing to the grower. . ..

The nuts from the different seedling trees in the College Farm plantation vary also in quality. Some are of good quality. . . having thin skins that are readily removed from the kernels. The nuts of other seedlings are more starchy and coarse in texture and have