Our breeding work with chestnuts began as far back as 1894 when pistillate blooms of the Paragon variety, then a novelty just coming into use, were dusted with pollen from a native sweet chestnut bearing good-sized nuts. The Paragon stigma were protected from the influence of other pollen by bagging and gave a good set of fruits. The idea was to improve the quality of the Paragon nuts even at the expense of size. The resulting seedlings were grown at Little Silver, New Jersey, and rapidly ran up into good-sized trees, coming into bearing twelve years later. In fruit and tree characters they proved a complete blend of the parent species, the nuts being double the size of the wild parent and of sweet, rich quality. The trees were very shapely and bid fair to become extremely productive but a year or two later were all attacked by the dreaded blight or bark disease, then spreading from its original starting point in Long Island. The work of destruction was very rapid and by the third year all were hopelessly crippled, but a few individuals continued to send up suckers as late as 1916. The success of this pollination experiment encouraged the writer to attempt breeding the dwarf early-bearing chinquapin with the large-fruited foreign varieties in the hope of securing hybrids with nuts of fair size and good quality that might come quickly into bearing. As the chinquapin does not naturally grow in Northern New Jersey, and plants were rarely offered by nurserymen, recourse was had to growing them from seed and a quantity of newly collected nuts were furnished by a friend in Washington in 1899. It required three years time to bring the seedlings into fruit and it was not until 1903 that a start was actually made in the work of hybridization. A selection was made of a compact dwarf bush that bore very sweet nuts of a good size for the species and gave promise, which was later fulfilled, of becoming very prolific. The male, or staminate tassels were carefully removed each day before maturity and, to ward off undesired foreign pollen, a cloth tent was used to cover the bush in addition to bagging many of the flowering branches. Pollen for crossing was secured from Paragon and Numbo, of the European species, and of several named varieties of Japan chestnut including Parry's Giant, Killen and Hale, and in addition a few blooms were intentionally fertilized with pollen from local sweet chestnut trees. Nearly one hundred hybrid seedlings resulted from the work in two succeeding seasons, some of which came into bearing in 1908, just as the _Endothia_ blight began to invade New Jersey. The hybrids between the chinquapins and native and European chestnuts were quickly infected, but those with Japan varieties appeared far more resistant. All work with the susceptible native and Europeans ceased, but crosses with Japans and the Chinese chestnut, _Castanea Molissima_, have been continued until now there are over eight hundred in existence. In late years we have