When the farmer takes the hulls from the black walnuts he generally spreads his hulled crop to dry almost anywhere. Rats will go over them, and these rats or mice infect the hulled walnuts with an organism called _Bacillus coli_ that is on the outside of the shell. They go from there to the cracking plant, go through the cracker which thoroughly mixes up the infected nuts with the clean ones. They go from there to the separator, which does a better job at spreading the bacteria. Then they go on the market. If they are shipped from one state to another they are subject to inspection by Federal authorities. If they find this organism in the kernels, they may at their discretion heave the whole shipment into the river. They don't always do it. They haven't worked out yet a definite scheme to follow. In other words, they will not tell us, "If your kernels have a certain number of these _B. coli_ in them we will let them by." As it reads, there should be not one organism there, and I can assure you that's almost impossible to get if a rat has crawled over those things. Now, to get rid of poison ivy the best way is not to get it, and it's just the same with this organism. The place to get rid of it would be for the farmer to store the nuts to dry where the rats and mice cannot get to them and for the cracking plants to do the same. Unfortunately, this isn't done and sometimes isn't practicable. The next place to hit them would be before they are tumbled, that is, before the black powder on the outside of the shells is shaken off in a tumbler, or immediately after that to disinfect the shell without hurting the kernel. That is where we should have started at West Virginia, but we didn't. We began at the other end after the thing was through and began studying pasteurization. The Government had recommended, I believe, temperatures of up to 300 deg.F. for pasteurization. We found out right away--that is, I didn't, Dr. Colmer and Harvey Erickson, who are now--one of them--in Baton Rouge and the other one in Seattle, and they would know about it. They found out that after temperatures of over 300 deg. the nuts tasted toasted and they would not keep nearly so well or so long as an unpasteurized nut. After inspecting what pasteurizers they could get access to they concluded some work was necessary, so they spent 12 months and found that at a temperature of 160 and humidity of 80 per cent a more efficient job of pasteurization was done, and at the same time the kernel was not hurt at all. The taste was identical with an unpasteurized nut, and it would keep just as long. At that point one of them, as I say, went to Louisiana and the other went to Washington, and the research fell on my shoulders, that didn't know much about it.