=Age of Fruiting.=--We hear much of the precociousness of pecan trees in the South, and many are reported as coming into bearing at the age of six to ten years from the time of planting the nut; but these are probably exceptional instances of early fruiting and not the rule, although in a favorable soil and climate it is to be expected that such trees will push forward more rapidly than under less favorable conditions. Grafted trees will, of course, produce fruit in less time than seedlings, and as this mode of propagation becomes more general, and repeated in a direct ancestral line, the cions for each successive generation of trees being taken from mature or bearing specimens, the precocious and productive habit will eventually become intensified, as it has been in all of our long-cultivated fruit trees propagated by artificial methods. We have so intensified the productiveness of many kinds of cultivated fruits by selection, that it has become more of a fault, than a merit to be encouraged. The nut trees are amenable to the same physiological laws as other kinds, and in their propagation by grafting with cions from bearing specimens we hasten maturity in the offspring. This has been fully demonstrated in many varieties of the Persian walnuts and European chestnuts. Here in the Northern States we have had so little experience with grafted hickories of any species, that really nothing is yet known as to how they will respond to this mode of propagation, further than that they grow rapidly and give promise of being fruitful. Seedling trees are, as a rule, of slow growth, rarely attaining a bearing age and size under twenty years, and with the shellbarks thirty or forty years usually pass before anything like a crop of nuts is gathered. Something may be gained, in the way of time, by frequent transplantings and pruning, but more by grafting seedlings from old and mature trees. Two grafts of the Hales' hickory commenced bearing at the age of sixteen years.