Similarly I see great possibilities in the interplanting of some leguminous crop tree such as the honey locust or the Kentucky coffee bean in our nut orchards. It is true neither of these trees has yet been selected and developed to the crop point, but they are much more promising than Sargent says the wild Persian walnut was at its beginning. It is an established fact that a non-leguminous plant can take nourishment from the nitrate-bearing nodules on the roots of adjacent living legumes, to say nothing of its well-known ability to feed upon the nitrate collections of legumes that have lived in past seasons within reach of its roots. Thus the interplanting of a legume and a nut tree seems to promise a continuous supply of the all-important nitrates for the nut tree. _The Question of Moisture._ It is not necessarily true that a tree gets a low percentage of the local rainfall because it is not plowed. The last palliation, or is it provocation, that I would throw into the camp of the orthodox and the worshippers of the plow, is the water-pocket, or small field reservoir, draining a few square rods and holding hard by the roots of a tree a few gallons or a few barrels of water which would otherwise run away. I showed this association a number of photographs of these water-pockets last year. Their most extensive American user, Dr. Mayer, considers them successful from the tree's standpoint and profitable from the economic standpoint. Since the great virtue of cultivation is the conservation of moisture, I will submit that this device, worked out and used for three centuries by the olive growers of Tunis, for twenty years by Dr. Mayer, of Pennsylvania, and about the same length of time by Colonel Freeman Thorpe, Minnesota, can from the point of theory and perhaps also from the point of practice, equal tillage on some soils, and with less labor and much greater economy in farm management, for the making of water pots is a job for odd times, the bane of agriculture, and tillage all comes in a pile--another bane of agriculture. Upon the whole, I think my 21 years of nut loving have run me directly and indirectly into ten thousand hard earned, and as yet, partly not earned dollars. Rather a deep sting for a pedagogue. When the last of my grafted chestnut trees come down next year, I will have little to show for that ten thousand, but an experimental nursery and some experimental trees scattered about the hillside. But the experiments are still interesting. I still have hope, and I still love trees. I am still ahead. * * * * * THE PRESIDENT: I believe every other man here today has defended his thesis. I will not claim any exemption.