When experimenting with hybridization of chinquapins, I ran across a phenomenon of new interest to botanists, and quite accidentally. A number of clusters of pistillate flowers of the bush chinquapin had been covered with paper bags, but not pollenized because of a shortage of pollen. An active man with a good sense of neatness and order would have removed those bags merely for the sake of appearance, but I was lazy and allowed the bags to remain for two or three weeks. When they were finally removed, it was found that the branches had set quite full of fruit, although not so full as other branches that had been pollenized from oaks. We were evidently dealing with an instance of parthenogenesis. The flowers that had received oak pollen did not show any oak parentage later in their progeny, and it was observed in other experiments in other years that almost any cupuliferous pollen would start cells of the chinquapin ovary into division and into the development of fertile nuts, but without inclusion of the pollen cell in a gamete. For purposes of convenience in thinking I have temporarily called this phenomenon "stereochemic parthenogenesis." Apparently the propinquity of foreign pollen serves to stimulate a female cell into division, although the pollen cell retains fixed molecular identity, and does not fuse with the female cell. I need not bring up abstruse questions of chromatin or of subatomic influence here. At Stamford the bush chinquapins begin to blossom regularly about the twelfth of June, irrespective of weather conditions. The tree chinquapins blossom a little later, but the alder-leaved chestnut may not blossom until July, later than the common American chestnut. The bush chinquapins begin to open their burs very regularly about the fifteenth of September; earlier than any other chestnuts. They bear at an early age, sometimes in their fifth summer. Grafting and budding is easily done among all of the chestnuts as a rule, and this year I employed for the first time a large chinquapin bush for top-working with the choice Merribrooke variety of the common chestnut. Every one of the grafts caught, and some of them have grown tremendously. This introduces an interesting question. May we graft the common American chestnut upon bush chinquapin stocks and secure precocious bearing? In that case we shall have trees like the dwarf apple and pear trees that are readily pruned and sprayed.