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 thick pellicles or skins that do not separate readily from the kernels. Such a natural variation in productiveness and quality is to be expected in seedling trees of any species or variety.

You see here the reason for the universal use of budded or grafted trees in the American fruit industry. However, I do not fully agree with the New Jersey bulletin as a description of the whole species, which indeed it does not claim to be. There is evidence that some strains of Chinese chestnut seedlings vary less than do others which may not be strains at all, merely mixtures.

Some plantations of seedlings are producing enough nuts to encourage their owners mightily and to cause the vendors of seedlings perhaps to become overenthusiastic about their wares and to mislead the public. There is no evidence that any hundred seedlings are on the average as good as an orchard of grafted trees.

So much for the Chinese chestnut, which seems securely started toward a rapidly increasing industry, with at least half a million well-watered square miles in the eastern United States as its field, and also a good little corner of the Pacific Coast.

We now have good varieties of Chinese chestnuts, good enough for an industry that is starting. Better trees may be discovered any year among the thousands of seedlings now scattered over more than twenty states. Further than this, there is no reason why we might not easily produce still better trees of the Chinese species by a very simple process of selection. The fact that each chestnut tree is almost self-sterile indicates that we can take two of the best trees we have, plant them side by side a quarter of a mile from any other chestnut trees, and be reasonably sure that almost all of the nuts are produced by a fusion of the strains of these two trees. This is very easy plant breeding, if we may so use the term. Plant these nuts, fruit them, take the best two trees of this generation, and repeat. By this process, we can be on the road to chestnut trees that will