Believing that our failures are often of far more value, in the line of education, than our successes, I shall not hesitate to place my own on record as guideposts to those who may be seeking the most direct road to success in nut culture. Having had a rather extended and expensive experience in the cultivation of filberts, I propose giving a brief account of it here, with the hope that it may save some other enthusiast from losing time and money. My attention was first specially drawn to these nuts in 1858,--while a resident of the city of Brooklyn, N. Y.,--by a neighbor who had a moderately large garden, on three sides of which he had planted a row of English filberts. These trees, at the time, had attained a hight of about fifteen feet, with broad, open heads, and they rarely failed to produce a heavy crop of nuts, which sold readily at very remunerative prices, for as they were always gathered in the husks and sold by the pound, the amount obtained from these few trees seemed to be enormous, considering the small space they occupied in this garden. The owner of these filbert trees, being an Englishman by birth, never tired of showing his English filberts to visitors, and of descanting upon their value, as well as upon the stupid indifference of the Yankees in neglecting the cultivation of these valuable nuts. I imbibed enough of my neighbor's enthusiasm to secure a good stock of his plants, a few years later, for cultivation in my grounds here. The third year after planting, quite a number of the bushes produced a fair crop of nuts, but I noticed that an occasional shoot was affected with blight, and these were immediately cut out and burned. The next season more of the branches were affected, and from these the blight extended downward on the main stems, and when these were cut away the sprouts from below made a very vigorous and apparently healthy growth, some reaching a hight of six feet the first season, but a year or two later these were also attacked and destroyed by blight. Finding that the filberts in my grounds were doomed, I visited my old neighbor in Brooklyn, hoping to learn something of the origin or cause of the disease; but the blight had invaded his garden, and not a tree remained. On my return from this visit I had every filbert and hazel plant on my place dug up and burned, thinking by such means to stamp out the disease. After waiting ten years, I thought it time to try filberts again, and to be certain of securing pure and healthy plants, I concluded to raise them from the nuts, and sent an order for a few pounds of the largest and best variety to be found in the celebrated filbert orchards of Kent, Eng. In due time the nuts arrived, and they were very large, and all of one variety, as ordered. They were mixed with sand and buried in the garden until the following spring, then sown thinly in shallow drills and covered with about two inches of rich soil.