DR. METCALF: It is almost impossible to answer that question because you have to define just what you mean by "living." If the chestnut tree is attacked first or early on the trunk, it is girdled and dies shortly, but if it is attacked first on the top there develop conditions like what is shown in this picture (showing photograph). I am not certain that you can see these bunches of suckers a little way up the tree. Now those trees will sometimes exist four or five years. I can say safely that I have seen trees last five years. DR. MORRIS: I can add three years to that. THE PRESIDENT: If there is no further discussion, we may adjourn. * * * * * FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 8TH, AT 8.15 P. M. Meeting called to order by the President. THE PRESIDENT: To my mind nut growing is part of a larger field, a field of conservation, one which is going to develop a whole new series of tree crops, of which the nuts are but a part. PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS. DR. J. RUSSELL SMITH. Agriculture is usually symbolized by a picture showing a man, a plow, and a sheaf of wheat. I would make the symbolization double by adding to it some kind of a nut tree in fruit. I have long had a vision of waving, sturdy, fruitful trees yielding nuts and other valuable fruit, and standing on our hilly and rocky land where now the gully and other signs of poverty, destruction and desolation gape at us. This vision of the fruitful tree also extends to the arid lands, there also vastly increasing our productive areas. Beyond a doubt the tree is the greatest engine of production nature has given us, and in its ability to yield harvests without soil injury on rough, rocky, and steep lands, and on arid lands, carries the possibility of the approximate doubling of the area of first-class cropping land in the United States, also probably in many other countries. Twenty-one years ago this spring I began in a small way to bring into reality this vision of the tree-covered fruitful hills, although my interest in the matter goes back at least four years further to the time when I filled my pockets with the large grafted European chestnuts grown along his lanes by the late Edwin Satterthwaite, of Jenkintown, Pa. My first essay at nut tree cropping was short but not sweet. I planted an acre and a half of Persian walnuts, seedlings being the only things then to be found. There being no one within my reach to guide me much, if any, I bought such seedlings as were to be had from a New Jersey nurseryman. I mulched them, and saw them each year grow less and less until the third season they disappeared. I have, however, some survival from this attempt in the form of black walnuts, which I had the foresight to plant as nuts immediately beside the Persian walnuts when they were planted as trees. Some of these walnuts are now quite sturdy young trees ready to be top-worked to some good strain.