In this new country the pioneers had necessarily to confine themselves to the fundamentals and it is to be expected that their horticultural operations were confined to a very narrow maintenance ratio. As the country was cleared up and developed certain sections were found to be especially suited to fruit culture. About these centers specialized fruit-growing industries were developed. These planters tried out all available varieties and developed their own methods of culture. As these industries developed horticultural societies were formed for the exchanging of ideas and experiences. In 1847 the American Pomological Society was formed as a national clearing house of horticultural ideas. The first work the society undertook was to determine the varieties of the different classes of fruits suitable for planting in different sections of the country. Patrick Barry, of Rochester, one of the pioneers of American horticulture was for years the chairman of the committees on varietal adaptation and did an immense amount of work on that line. At the meetings of the society he went alphabetically over the variety lists of fruits and called for reports on each one from growers all over the country. This practice was kept up for years and the resulting data were collated and compiled in the society's reports. In this systematic way the varietal adaptations of the different classes of fruits were accurately worked out for all parts of the country. A similar systematic roll call of classes and varieties of nuts grown by the members of this association would be of immense value to intending planters of nut trees. In northern nut-growing, however, it may be questioned if we are yet arrived at the Patrick Barry stage. What we need is pioneer planters who have the courage to plant nut trees and take a chance against failure and not wait for others to blaze the trail. It needs men of vision and courage to plant the unknown and look with hope and optimism to the future. So many are deterred from planting by the fact that nut trees are tardy in coming into bearing and uncertain of results. In these stirring times we want men of nerve in the orchard as well as in the trenches. We need tree planters like Prof. Corsan who, at a former meeting of this association when joked about planting hickories, replied that he wasn't nervous and could watch a hickory tree grow. It takes nerve to be an innovator and to plant some radically different crop from what your conservative neighbors all about you are planting. The Georgia cotton planters wagged their heads and tapped their foreheads when Col. Stuart and Major Bacon turned good cotton land into pecan groves. But the thousands of acres of commercial pecan orchards now surrounding these original plantings showed that these pioneer pecan planters were not lunatics or impractical dreamers, but courageous men of vision, thirty years ahead of their time.