October 7, 1920, 12:45
The members of the Northern Nut Growers' Association, in convention at Washington, D. C., October 7, 1920, made an excursion which included visits to the thirty-acre bearing northern pecan plantation of T. P. Littlepage; Dr. Walter Van Fleet's Government Station for the production of blight-resisting chestnuts and chickapins and other new hybrids, at Bell Experiment Plot, Glendale, Maryland; and the old Jefferson pecan trees at Marietta. The following notes were taken at points along the route:
Dr. Van Fleet: These are hybrids between the chinkapin and the Japan chestnut showing the blight even after thirteen years immunity. We do not do anything to check the disease at all.
There is a Japan variety said not to take it but you see how it affects it. It girdles it and the new wood builds it up. The tree is doomed. It is gone now but it has made a tremendous attempt to recovery. You see the new growth that has tried to come out there trying to bridge it and make it up. Of course even that is hopeful. In view of that we feel justified in breeding. The Chinese resist it much better. They take it more readily but they resist it far better. The efforts at self-bridging are quite successful.
This is one of the hybrids we have at Arlington. The parent tree got along for thirteen years without a sign of blight. By artificial inoculation we have given it the disease but it does not get it in the trunk. This is a Chinese chestnut seven years old and has had three crops. We took the most virulent virus and made a few inoculations and with absolutely no care the wound is closing up. The tree is apparently quite healthy. This is the Chinese Molissima, not of real good quality. These are only seven years old and have already borne three very good crops. The nuts are somewhat larger than the wild native and ripen about six weeks earlier.
There are 1,100 trees here and I think about a hundred have been killed outright and probably 75 per cent of them show infections but there are a few individuals that do not seem to get it. It seems almost impossible to inoculate them. We are letting the disease run its way purely through elimination. It is only those that can stand it through a series of years that are supposed to be worth anything at all.
Probably no species is immune from it; I do not think we can use the word "immunity" in connection with it.
The party then visited the old Jefferson place at Marietta, and viewed the immense pecan trees which were given to Judge Duval by Thomas Jefferson. Thence to Mr Littlepage's plantation.
Mr. Littlepage: These trees are set 100 by 120. The Butterick is a good grower. There is a great difference in the growth of the cultivated and the uncultivated ones. I would quit working about the first of August. The first of August here they are growing actively.
Question: Is that the habit of the pecan to set a crop and then drop off?
Mr. Littlepage: Yes, young trees will do that. This is a typical Busseron. They were all sprinkled with nuts; this tree had fifty nuts on this spring. There are some caterpillars on the Stuart. This is the work of the caterpillars on the Stuart. It set a number of nuts. This Greenriver is a little larger than the Major. It is one of the prettiest nuts, one of our medium sized northern pecans. The Greenriver grows in a forest in the Green River district in Kentucky. This is the first transplanted pecan tree this far north that has grown nuts.
Dr. Morris: In two or three years you will have a crop on them.
Mr. Littlepage: That is a Major, they grow like the Cedars of Lebanon. You don't see a winter-killed twig on a tree. They were full of nuts this spring.
Mr. Morris: That is so thrifty and so hardy that it might have some species of hickory in it.
Mr. Littlepage: The Stabler black walnut is much better than the Thomas. All black walnuts are reasonably easy to propagate. I have them all around over the farm; I stick pecans around the fences, or wherever I have a space. This chestnut is a European variety. It bears a big striped nut. It tastes a little better than the sweet potato.
Dr. Morris: It is good for cooking. It is the same as the Marron.
Mr. Littlepage: They are the Indiana hazels, and this is an European filbert.
EVENING SESSION
Thursday October 7 1920 8 P. M.
The convention was called to order by the President, Mr. Linton, at 8 o'clock.
The President: The presentation of the next speaker will be made by Mr. Littlepage.
Mr. Littlepage: I want to take just one or two minutes in introducing Mr. Reed, the next speaker on the program. The Department of Agriculture, as we all know, is an aggregation of many of the very brightest men in this country. Those of us who are here in Washington know that at times it is sadly in need of organization. It is perfectly apparent to anybody who has judgment enough to make observations that there is a great deal of very valuable material down there going to waste for the lack of organization. Perhaps it will always be so. I do not know. Institutions are not perfect because the individuals constituting these institutions are not perfect. The Department of Agriculture is, taken as a whole, a most wonderful institution. I do wish, however, that the Department officials would not always wait until they think they know exactly all the facts about a thing before they publish it. I sometimes wish they had enough nerve to say: "Now, this is what we found out today. We may change our minds tomorrow and if we do we will tell you so," the same as any other honest citizen. Why in the world they collect all the data they do, file it away day after day, month after month and year after year, and publish it after it is of no use to anyone on this earth, I never could figure out! I know it is a difficult problem because if the Department of Agriculture should say today that Winesap apples grow beautifully on Maryland hills some fellow would promptly capitalize that and go to selling the Maryland hills, the water underneath, the air above them and everything around them for the modest sum of ten times what it was worth. So that is the other side of it. It makes it necessary for the Department of Agriculture, of course, to be cautious. I know, however, that you all think as I do because you have said so to me but you do not all have the nerve to get up here and say as I do that the Department of Agriculture ought to give us more of these data; that they ought to give it to us for what it is worth today and in this lifetime, leaving it to us to have a little common sense to know that what they say must be taken as they say it. However, I did not get up here to say all of those things. My purpose is to introduce the speaker.
Now, I happen to know a great deal about Mr. Reed's work. I know that he is one of the most active men in the Department and one of the men who has, as much as anybody in the Department of Agriculture, the confidence of those of us who know about the project that he is working on. Mr. Reed has more work in the Department of Agriculture than he can do and I have been trying to lay out some additional work for him. For example, we have found in Southwestern Illinois a larger pecan than any propagated in the North. I saw it in a bunch of Schleys which is the premier pecan of the South. It was larger than many of the Schleys. We don't know anything more about the pecan but I would like to know about this and several others. That is one little job that comes under Mr. Reed's supervision and he ought to have more time and more help. As a matter of fact everybody in the Department thinks he should have more money for his particular project. Those of us who are interested in nut work think the nut people should have more money. The Department was very fortunate in receiving Mr. Reed who came from Michigan. I have talked to him many times and I have never found him yet to make a statement about anything in the nut world that he could not back up. In an illustrated lecture of this kind you have the good fortune to get a great many data that you cannot get in any other way. I wish the whole country that has an interest in these matters could hear it. If I could think of anything else good to say about Mr. Reed I would say it. He is entitled to it. (Applause.)
NUT CULTURE IN THE UNITED STATES.
C. A. Reed, Washington, D. C.
We are annually importing into the United States from $30,000,000 to more than $52,000,000 worth of nuts. In this country, production is of leading importance with but three species,—the Persian (English) walnut, the pecan, and the almond. Of these together, we are producing in the neighborhood of $26,000,000 worth of nuts. In addition to these three species, two others now bid fair to become of considerable importance within the next decade. These are the filbert of the Northwest and the Eastern black walnut. In the Northwest, the filbert is receiving intensive attention at the hands of a considerable number of skilled horticulturists. The species is making rapid strides and in a short while will probably rank fourth in importance with reference to the extent to which it has been developed horticulturally. Possibly because of the extent to which it is common over the United States, the black walnut might properly now be rated as fourth as that nut has as great, if not a greater, range and is of interest to more people in this country than is any other one species of nut. It remains, however, to be seen how rapidly it will be developed by the pomologists.
The view before you is one which some of you have seen before. It was taken in the famous Vrooman orchard of Persian walnut trees at Santa Rosa, California. This is the largest and most noted orchard of Franquette variety in the country. It is from this orchard that scions have been obtained for the propagation of a great part of the Franquette orchards in this country.
In the Willamette Valley of Western Oregon, the walnut has received a large amount of attention during recent years; its development there has made rapid strides, and in the better soils, the trees grow rapidly and ordinarily bear very well. The photograph before you was taken in February, 1920, in an orchard near Hillsboro. It was situated on low but rich land and I regret to say that it was practically wiped out of existence by an unusual cold spell occurring from the 12th to the 15th of December in 1919. During that spell, the temperatures went down in some points of the Willamette Valley to 24 degrees below zero. As nearly as could be told at the time the picture was taken the trees were all killed to the snowline which was from a foot and a half to two feet above ground. The owner has since reported that he cut the trees down to that line.
To some extent, the Persian walnut is grown in the eastern part of the United States. It was introduced here long before it was on the Atlantic Coast, but this side of the Rocky Mountains, it has nowhere become of great commercial importance. The photograph before you was taken in 1911. It shows a seedling orchard of twenty-three Persian walnut trees in Bucks County in the northwestern part of Pennsylvania. The orchard then appeared to be in first-class condition with no sign of winter-injury, but so far as we have been able to ascertain, the trees have never borne important crops of nuts.
This tree before us is the parent, or original tree of the Nebo variety from Southern Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, a variety first propagated by Messrs. Rush and Jones. It is one of the old historical trees of that section, and while the nut it produces is very good in many respects, for various reasons, the variety is no longer being propagated to great extent.
This is the parent Rush tree, another variety now not propagated as much as formerly, but one which, nevertheless, is a good sort and regarded as being well worthy of planting about the home grounds in sections of the eastern part of the country to which the species is adapted.
The Persian walnut is evidently quite at home from the eastern shore of Maryland up through Delaware and New Jersey to Long Island and lower Connecticut. From this strip west inland to well toward York and Harrisburg in Southern Pennsylvania, it is by no means uncommon. To some extent, it is grown in Western New York and close to Lake Erie in Northern Ohio. There are some trees in Eastern Michigan and a very few in what is known as the Niagara Peninsula of Ontario, but with few exceptions, the crops they bear are uncertain.
The tree before us is the parent of the Aurand variety named in honor of Mr. Geo. D. Aurand of Lewistown, Mifflin County, Pennsylvania. The gentleman in the foreground is Mr. Aurand in the act of examining a split in the bark caused by winter-injury. This trouble is fairly prevalent over a great part of the east.
Leaving the walnut industry for the time being, we will take a fleeting glance at the pecan industry. The greater part of our pecan crop comes from wild trees in the Southwest. The view before us is typical of Texas scenes especially in such towns as San Saba, Brownwood and others where nuts are brought from the country in wagon loads much the same as are cereals in the northern states. Pecan orchard development has taken place almost wholly in states east of the limits of the native range. In sections to which the pecan has been indigenous development has been very slow. The greatest and most extensive development of any section happens to be in Southwestern Georgia.
The view before us was taken in an orchard of Frotscher trees in Thomasville some 20 miles north of the Georgia-Florida state line. The trees were planted in 1905, set fifty feet apart, and last spring, because of crowding, the alternate trees were removed. The lower limbs had begun to die and the nuts from the lower branches had, for several years, been inferior in both size and filling quality.
The trees in the orchard before you were three years planted when photographed. This is an orchard in the Albany district of southwestern Georgia. It is in the immediate Albany district that more pecan planting has taken place than in any other one district of the whole South. It is possible to go from Albany in most any direction and to pass through orchards on both sides of the road with rows of pecan trees extending as far as the eye can see in each direction.
There is more or less, of a prevailing idea that the pecan is a California product but it is the exception rather than the rule to find thrifty and productive trees in that state. The tree before you is one which bore enough nuts during a recent year to bring $125 in the market, at 20 cents a pound.
Coming considerably nearer home, we find the parent tree of the Butterick variety situated on the Illinois side of the Wabash River a short distance below Vincennes, Indiana. The range of the pecan, as the most of you probably know, extends well up into Iowa along the bank of the Mississippi River and also into Central Illinois along the Illinois and other rivers and north to Terre Haute, Indiana, along the Wabash. The Butterick has been regarded as one of the most promising northern varieties. Reports which seem to be fairly well authenticated are to the effect that this fine tree has since partially died because of having its roots cut in the digging of a ditch.
Two years ago, Dr. J. B. Curtis (who is present in the audience) and myself spent a week's vacation in Eastern Maryland. At Easton we were greatly surprised to find what we agreed was the largest planted pecan tree we had ever seen. During the past summer, this tree has been photographed and its measurements taken: It has a girth measurement at breast height of 15 feet. Its spread is 129 by 138 feet. Its height was estimated at approximately 135 feet. It is not one of the largest pecan trees of the country as larger trees are not uncommon in many sections from Southern Indiana, south and west to Texas but they are native and not planted trees. We know this to be a planted tree as there are no native pecans in the state of Maryland. This tree bears with a fair degree of regularity. We are told that in 1917 it yielded approximately twelve bushels of nuts which, although small, were exceedingly good and a delight to the children of the whole neighborhood.
Taking up the almond industry, the view before you is of interest because of historical reasons rather than otherwise. It is one of the few remaining large orchards planted by the late Mr. A. T. Hatch known as father of the principal varieties of California today. Mr. Hatch planted several hundred acres of almonds in the vicinity of Suisun about midway between Sacramento and San Francisco but cold winds from San Francisco Bay prevent almond trees in that section from being commercially productive, and as result, the section has been abandoned as an almond center. Nevertheless, this picture is of interest because it was in these very orchards that were originated the famous Hatch varieties, the Ne Plus Ultra, Nonpareil, I. X. L. and the Drake. A great part of this orchard has since been topworked with prunes.
Almond orchards in bloom afford some of California's most beautiful sights during February. The two trees in the foreground are typical specimens of I. X. L. while in full bloom. The almond begins bearing at about the same age as does the peach; at 5 or 6 years from the time the trees are planted, they begin to pay a little more than the cost of up-keep, and at 8 years, they are regarded as being in full bearing.
This scene was taken in one of the oldest orchards in the state of California. The trees were planted in about 1870. The picture affords a typical illustration of one of the methods of harvesting. The nuts are being thrashed or "knocked" from the trees to heavy canvas sheets spread upon the ground which are drawn from tree to tree by horse power. The nuts are loaded loose in wagons or in sacks and taken to some central plant where they are run through hulling machines and the nuts separated from the hulls after which they are spread out in trays and left in the sun to dry. At that season of the year, there is practically no danger of dew or rain and, after being exposed for several days and nights during which they are frequently stirred, they are taken to the nearest exchange point, bleached and put forth into final shape for the market.
A very important factor in the success of almond production is the honey-bee. Bee keepers shift their hives from orchard to orchard during the blossoming period making a profit out of the honey and at the same time charging a rental to the orchard owners. The bees, of course, attend to the matter of interpollination.
In some sections, it is necessary to equip the orchards with smudge or fire pots which are kept filled with crude oil and fired at the moment the temperature goes down to below the freezing point during the blossoming period. In one district these pots were this last year fired again and again but after all the temperature went down to a point such that a great part of the crop was lost. We are told that it is possible to raise the temperature 26 to 34 degrees. It is tedious work and a dirty job. The oil is placed in the pots in the daytime and the firing usually takes place in the latter part of the night, very often after 5 o'clock in the morning.
We come now to the filbert industry. One of the reasons why filberts were planted in the northwest was because the native hazels grow there with great vigor. This picture shows a typical stool of the native hazel as it is commonly seen in the western parts of Oregon and Washington. Not infrequently it attains a height of 30 or 35 feet and when trained to single stems, the trees not infrequently develop trunk diameters of from 6 to 8 inches.
The Mr. Vollertsen of the Northwest is Mr. A. A. Quarnberg of Vancouver, Washington. In 1893 Mr. Quarnberg read an article by the late Professor H. E. Van Deman in which the latter urged the experimental planting of the filbert in the Northwest. Mr. Quarnberg ordered two trees of the Du Chilly variety from Mr. Felix Gillett, a Frenchman and then proprietor of the Barren Hill Nurseries, Nevada City, California. These were planted in February of 1894 and are believed to have been the first trees of that variety shipped to the Northwest. They are so close together that they are considerably crowded but still they have done fairly well, bearing in some years as much as 45 pounds together.
This is a view of the first filbert orchard planted in the Northwest. It consists of three hundred trees mainly of the Barcelona and Du Chilly varieties obtained from Mr. Gillett in January of 1901 by Mr. Quarnberg and planted by him for a neighbor, Mr. John E. Norelius.
In this connection, it is interesting to note that the Barcelona variety had already become fairly well established in the Northwest when Mr. Quarnberg first introduced the Du Chilly to that section. The picture before you is of one of the oldest Barcelona trees that has come to my personal attention. It shows a tree in Portland measuring 45 inches in circumference one foot above ground. It is perhaps the largest filbert tree in the United States. When visited during the past September, the limbs were bending down with nuts and an estimate was made that it would have from 50 to 70 pounds of mature nuts.
The tree before us was another Barcelona of good size. In 1919 it matured a crop of 45 pounds of nuts. However, unfortunately it was caught by the cold spell already referred to and the tree about half killed. It stands in a low place in an orchard of some fifty trees and was one of the most seriously affected.
Returning to the East, we have before us a picture of an Italian Red filbert tree in the orchard of Messrs. Vollertsen and McGlennon north of Rochester, New York. It is a young tree not over two years old. Each terminal has a cluster of nuts. Mr. Vollertsen is observing it closely and thus far regards it favorably.
Mr. J. G. Rush of West Willow, Pennsylvania has brought out a native hazel which offers considerable promise to nut planters. It is a remarkably prolific variety and the nuts are both large and thin-shelled. This picture illustrates something of its heavy bearing tendency.
We come now to the black walnut. One of the first varieties propagated was the Thomas. This picture is one of several hundred grafted trees of that variety owned by Mr. E. A. Riehl of Godfrey, Illinois. As here shown, they are very prolific and these hundred trees grown mainly on hillsides and untillable lands are furnishing Mr. Riehl with a very fair income. On the whole, the Thomas is a good variety. It cracks much better than does the average black walnut but still there are some others which are a shade better in the matter of cracking quality. The picture before you shows the parent tree of the variety first known as Rush but later changed to Herman in order to avoid confusion of names with the Rush Persian walnut. This variety has been propagated to some extent but according to recent accounts, the parent tree has been cut down. The tree now before you is the parent of a well known variety, the Stabler. It is situated in Montgomery County, Maryland, some 20 miles from the city of Washington. Reports have it that this tree bore 30 bushels of nuts in one mythical year, but the present owner states that the maximum yield of any year since he has known the tree has been 10 or 11 bushels of hulled nuts. The variety is being propagated by several nurserymen and trees are available for planting.
Another variety now being propagated by the nurserymen is the Ohio, the parent tree of which is some 20 or 30 miles out of Toledo in the state after which it was named. This picture, (showing seven nuts) illustrates a remarkable tendency on the part of young grafted trees to bear at an early age. This tree in the nursery of Mr. Jones of Lancaster, Pa., was grafted in May and photographed in September one year following. Of course early bearing is not wholly desirable but in a way it will refute the common belief that black walnuts are necessarily tardy in coming into bearing.
Col. J. C. Cooper, McMinnville, Oregon, President of the Western Walnut Growers Association has on his home grounds two black walnut trees grown from nuts obtained in the East which were 6 years old when this picture was taken. Each of these trees which you will notice are from 20 to 30 feet high bore approximately a peck of nuts during the year when photographed.
The native butternut is a species which has been quite neglected by our horticulturists but through the efforts of Mr. Bixby, a few varieties have been brought out and are now being propagated by the nurserymen. In spite of its thick shell, the flavor of the butternut is preferred by many people to that of any other nut on the market. It is our most hardy species of nut tree. It grows as far north as Maine and Nova Scotia. Two or three recognized varieties are being propagated. Probably those which will soonest be available for dissemination to the public are the Aiken from New Hampshire and the Deming from Connecticut.
One of our most decorative native trees is the American beech. As fine a specimen as is often seen is this one not far from Easton, Maryland photographed during the past summer. It is an enormous tree and very productive. It is one of forty or fifty trees on the grounds of one of the numerous large estates of Eastern Maryland and was planted, so we are told, in 1830. The lady giving this information said that her mother had the trees dug up in the forest by slaves and hauled to their present location in ox carts. Now, ninety years later, they form a magnificent avenue of trees. Fine crops of nuts are borne each year. The nuts are small and most too tedious to extract from the shell to be useful for human consumption, but they go a long way in the finishing off of the turkeys and other poultry in the fall.
Another species of nut which is quite neglected is the Japanese walnut. It has been on trial in this country for perhaps fifty or seventy-five years. It has indicated its adaptability to a wide range of the country; it succeeds on a great variety of soils and it is both hardy and early to come into bearing. It has this disadvantage, however,—the nuts are small; but in flavor the kernals can hardly be distinguished from those of the butternut. Very often it forms a most attractive tree and it should be used to a much greater extent than it is on home lawns.
In Michigan, hickory and black walnut trees have been used along the highways as avenue trees for a considerable period. In Pennsylvania occasionally the Persian walnut is used as an avenue tree. One of the beauty spots along the roadway of Lancaster County is this stretch of roadway under the spreading branches of Persian walnut trees. Senator McNary of Oregon thought so well of the beauty of the filbert that he induced his brother to plant several trees on his lawn in the city of Salem. It is no exageration to say that there are no prettier trees in the city then are these before you.
To a considerable extent, nut raising is being combined with the poultry industry in the Northwest. The poultry raisers claim that some kind of trees are essential to furnish shade in the poultry yards. They say that fruit trees are not desirable for the reason that at harvest time the chickens not only pick and ruin the fruit but themselves get internal disorders. Nut trees, they argue, fit in very well, as the chickens cannot hurt the nuts nor the nuts the chickens. Furthermore, the trees in chicken parks salvage a great deal from the chicken manure which would otherwise be lost. The use of nut trees in this way is a practice which it would seem could well be introduced to good advantage in the eastern states.
Among the ornamentals, it is difficult to imagine a species which could more effectively be used than the pecan. The picture before you was taken of a comparatively young tree perhaps 30 or 40 years old on the home grounds of a private citizen near Easton, Maryland at practically our own latitude. It is a most beautiful tree.
Rightly used, the black walnut is also one of our most effective species in the landscape. The picture before you is of a tree 51 years old. It stands in front of the home residence of a sister to United States Senator Charles L. McNary of Salem, Oregon. When photographed, this tree measured 10 feet, 6 inches in girth at breast height. It would be hard to imagine a more noble and graceful nut.
Along the roadways of California, we not uncommonly find the native black walnut used as an avenue tree. It is very refreshing and cooling on a hot day to drive under trees of the sort illustrated in the picture before you. This avenue of trees is along the Lincoln Highway less than a mile west of the University grounds at Davis.
The President: The next speaker on the program will be presented by Dr. Morris.
Dr. Morris: They say that a biographer unconsciously writes his autobiography. That is not tautology. Some one writing of the late Frank N. Mayer said: "The plant hunter and explorer is the unsung Columbus of horticulture." Our next speaker was the one who wrote that in Mr. Meyer's biography. We all recognize it as autobiography. Emerson tells us that every successful institution is the lengthened shadow of one man. There were heroes before Agamemnon and botanists before Dr. Fairchild, but with the beginning of the new century there came into existence the development of a new idea, that of exploration in foreign countries for the purpose of bringing to us their valuable plant products. It was one of those things which we may say makes the whole world kin because the economists tell us that basically the food supply is fundamental to all subsequent human activities. Dr. Fairchild organized the machinery of exploration for purposes of introduction into this country of valuable plants from foreign lands. There is perhaps at the present time no one who serves better as peace maker than does the one who gives the world more food. From the economist's standpoint the food supply subtends all advances in civilization. Now the hour is late and we all know what Dr. Fairchild has done. Any remarks on my part are made because they belongs to the form of polite procedure rather than because of need for telling of things which Dr. Fairchild has accomplished.
Dr. Fairchild: Ladies and Gentlemen of the Northern Nut Growers Association. When I face men and women who are doing things in agriculture I feel a peculiar degree of embarrassment. I do not know why but I suppose it is because what I have done, what little I have done in bringing in these new things, has never enabled me to get to the bottom of any of the things that I have brought in. In other words I feel that I am in the presence of a number of men who know down to the very smallest minutiae the business that they are engaged in. Now I do not know these minutiae about plants. I wish I did. There is nothing more fascinating in the world than to take one crop and learn to know it "down to the ground." It is coming to be one of the greatest things in the imagination of man, this grappling with the fundamental problems of agriculture which are wrapped up in the varieties of the plants that we grow. I have had a very severe education in that matter of varieties and I want to congratulate you as a body of men and women who are individually going to find out what these best varieties are.
I suppose that the talk that Mr. Reed and I had in a bamboo grove out in Chico., California, when we were trying to find out uses for the bamboo and Reed said: "Well, the pecan and almond growers want to knock the nuts off their trees with these bamboo poles," is what led up to this talk, and I want to thank Mr. Reed for the opportunity to show slides of a few of the new plants which we are working on in the Department of Agriculture.
We brought in so many of them, (47,000 different kinds) in these 22 years that the office of Plant Introduction has been in operation that Mr. Reed suggested that the nut growers would like to have thrown on the screen pictures of the nuts of foreign countries. I said that we did not have any. Then I began to dig into our own literature, project reports, experimenters cards, correspondence and the other recording machinery that we have and I found that we had a good many. I want to make it perfectly plain to you that what I am going to do tonight is simply to open a door and show you the possibilities of some of these foreign nuts. There are a great many more that we have not succeeded in landing on the shores of America, and if any one of you will come to my office on 13th and F streets I will throw all the correspondence and photographs on the table and let you look through it.
It has been said that the Department's work is badly organized. Yes, it is badly organized. But I do not know how you are going to very well organize with a small body of men a group of projects every one of which is a life job for a man, especially when you cannot get the men, and when you do get them they do not stay on the job for life. So there is the great difficulty. Mr. Littlepage has hit the nail on the head. The Department of Agriculture is not well organized but it is not an easy thing to organize experimental work on at least 150 different kinds of industries with the money and the men we have. The fact that the investigations require the men to be on the land close to their work and that we are all in city buildings, is a great handicap. We have scarcely a tree or shrub or plant of any kind that bears on our work within two or three miles of the Department of Agriculture building. We need the land. We need a great many more men, and we need more money.
I landed in Greece in 1901. In Athens I saw them selling on the streets these pistache nuts which I opened with my fingers. The kernels are a brilliant green. I had never seem them before. I had heard of them. They were sold around the streets by the Greek peddlers and called pistachios. The pistache or pistachio industry is one which I wish some young, energetic man of seventy would take up. I say 70 because it requires a young man of seventy to take up one of these nut industries, the boys of 26 are too old. Some young fellow of seventy should go into the pistache industry and find out what there is in it and develop it into a great industry. The American Consul in Palestine told me six or eight years ago that there was no plant culture in all Palestine that paid so well as a pistache orchard. Trees have been known to yield as much as 40 to 50 dollars apiece. The Grecian pistaches are different from those of Tunis and Algeria and others of the Mediterranean countries. There are a good many different varieties.
This picture shows a piece of praline made of pistaches. This is sold on the streets of Athens and compares very favorably with our pralines made in New Orleans from the kernel of the pecan.
Mr. Chisholm, who was connected with the Consulate in Athens and who spoke Greek very well, took me out and showed me what these pistache trees looked like and when I found this miscellaneous lot of grafted pistache trees I made an arrangement to purchase the whole collection and send it to this country. I had great difficulty in getting the American Consul in Piraeus to help me ship them. I could not wait indefinitely and it took a good while to have them dug and packed. I asked him if he would send them and he said he was very busy. I told him this was a matter which concerned the people of the United States and if he did not have time to do it I would telegraph to the Secretary of Agriculture and tell him that the Consul in Athens was too busy to ship these plants. Finally he consented to ship them and this was the first shipment of grafted pistache trees to arrive in America. They were badly grafted, badly packed and badly prepared and I think only one of this whole collection survived and is now growing in the Gallespie grounds at Montecito, California.
Mr. Kearney ought to be here tonight and Mr. Swingle and Dr. Rixford. These three men have given more attention to the pistache than I have. Mr. Kearney was studying the date palm industry of Southern Tunis and in connection with it he made a study of the pistache industry of the desert region of the coast of Tunis. This picture represents an Arab standing beside an old pistache tree that probably is forty or fifty years of age. It represents the pistache in its winter dress. They are deciduous trees. They plant one male tree to about twenty females. We have had a great real of difficulty in propagating these pistache trees. We have five different species of stock on which to grow them, and we ought to learn all the best varieties in the world. But unfortunately some of the best varieties in Sicily are infested with a moth which lays its eggs in the twigs just below the leaf scar and it is impossible for the entomologist to detect these eggs without destroying the buds. That apparently trivial circumstance has made it impossible for us to get these cuttings in from Sicily without sending a trained horticulturist there for them. We never have had the money to send a man there who could do it, a man who had had the necessary experience. As a consequence we have not as big a collection of these pistache varieties as we ought to have.
These men in the photograph are getting the scions for Mr. Kearney, and I am glad to say that these particular scions which they cut are now growing in California. Mr. Kearney also on this same trip visited the Duke de Bronte estate on the slopes of Mount Etna. It was an estate bequeathed by the King of Italy to Lord Nelson, who was made the Duke de Bronte and it is still the property of the Nelson family. Mr. Beck, who was the manager for this estate and with whom we have had correspondence for nearly 18 years, gave us perhaps more information than we have gotten from any other foreign source on the cultivation of the pistache. The Trabonella, which was one of the best commercial varieties, came from the Bronte estate on the slopes of Mount Etna, where pistache growing is a paying industry. In Europe the nuts are very largely used, outside of the Mediterranean region for making the pistache ice cream because of the green color in the seed itself, and in the Mediterranean region both the yellow and green varieties as we are coming to use them in this country, as table nuts. The highest price is paid for the green pistache nuts which are used in ice creams and confectioneries. Here are two Sicilian horticulturists, one of them holding a bundle of bud sticks. This Trabonella variety is now growing in America. We have collected pistache nuts from many parts of the world. A very interesting man by the name of Jewett who became acquainted with the late Ameer of Afghanistan procured for us the Afghanistan pistache. I got in correspondence with him through the Consul in Calcutta. Through a mistake made in sending some of this correspondence direct instead of to Calcutta it nearly cost him his life. I did not know the conditions there and asked Jewett in my letter what the possibilities were of sending an Agricultural explorer there. The letter fell into the hands of the Ameer and aroused his suspicions. Jewett was one of the two English speaking persons at that time in the country. One Sunday morning my door bell rang, and Jewett came to my house in Connecticut Avenue with two big saddle bags filled with seed sent by the Ameer. This collection of pistache seeds with its Afghanistan label composed part of the collection of seeds. Very few of the seeds grew however and the seedlings, which like many nut trees do not come true to seed, have not produced any varieties of particular value.
A year ago I had the pleasure of making a motor tour through California. I went to see Leonard Coats, one of those real pioneers of 65 or 70 years of age, who has perhaps done as much for California horticulture as any other one nurseryman, and he took me up into his orchard on the hill side overlooking his nursery where no drops of rain had fallen between the months of March and October when I was there and where they only have 22 inches of rainfall anyway, and I found growing there this collection of pistache trees which we had sent him about ten years ago. The nuts are borne towards the ends of the branches. The tree is able to withstand any amount of drought and as I sat there and he told me how prohibition had wiped out the vineyards of the surrounding country, how the Italians had deserted them and gone back to Italy, I could not help feeling that in this beginning on his hillsides we had the possibility of covering those thousands of acres of hillsides which exist in California today, from which the grape vines have been taken out, with a nut crop of the very first importance. These little beginnings are really the most interesting things in life. I read in the paper today that this is the ninety-fourth anniversary of the first railroad in America and my mind went back to a conversation I had with Edward Everett Hale when he told me that his father was the first man to bring over an English locomotive to America. What do you suppose was the principal objection that the people had to railway exploitation in this country? They could not see how two trains could pass each other on the same track. So his father brought over from England a little model switch and put it down in his parlor and took people in there and showed them that two trains could pass if one ran off on a siding. That story of Edward Everett Hale has helped me to understand why it is that most people hesitate to go ahead into any new industry always seeing some impossibility in its development. I could probably prove to you beyond a shadow of a doubt that not a single one of these nut trees I am showing you tonight could ever be made a success. Notwithstanding that they are successful.
This is one of the Sfax varieties from Tunis growing in our plant introduction gardens at Chico. We had to establish gardens where we could grow these trees and send out the young plants to growers and in these gardens we have test nurseries or test orchards as we call them where we grow these fruits. This is an Assyrian variety brought in by old Dr. Fuller who spent some time as a missionary in Asia Minor and became convinced of the importance of the pistache industry, and has been one of the pioneers in these small beginnings. This is a six years old tree. This is 15 years old a seedling tree near Fresno. It has borne a good many crops of fair sized pistache nuts as large as the Trabonella, the Sfax, the Tunis and the Alleppo and those forms which are going to be the real pistaches of the future in this country. The pistache in fruit is a most interesting sight. The nuts are pinkish. They have the pinkness of the peach, almost, without the fuz and they are covered with a thin skin which is taken off usually with the fingers. The nut inside has a texture that makes it very attractive. When they are first gathered it is very difficult to crack them with the fingers but if they are put in the oven and roasted they open up and leave a little suture into which you put your thumb nails and pry the ends open.
This picture gives you some idea of the yield of the pistache. It is a fair yielder, as much as fifty pounds of nuts having been borne by eight or nine year old trees. Ours have not done as well as that. The price of course ranges like the price of all other nuts. They sold last year for 75 cents a pound here in Washington. The kernels sell for $1.50.
This gives you a good idea of the pistache fruit with its outer shell, the nut and the green interior. If any of you are going to California and do not like the idea of taking up hazel nuts, walnuts and pecans, if you will take up this industry we will help you all we can. It will grow in Arizona, New Mexico, and we have records of them growing in Arkansas. They will stand a temperature below zero. Trees have been known to live through several winters even in Southern Kansas.
In all these investigations we have found the stock problem is very important. Here we have the Pistachia atlantica which has much smaller seeds. It is this that we are using most commonly as a stock for the pistaches that are being grown in California. Frank N. Meyer brought back from China the seeds of the Chinese pistache, the hardiest of all pistaches, a tree which has been almost hardy even as far north as Washington and central Kansas. It is not only a nut tree but a magnificent ornamental tree and grows to a very large size. We have used it as an avenue tree leading to our plant introduction gardens in Chico because it colors up so beautifully in the autumn and the spring. In the spring the tips of these leaves and branches are a brilliant pink and in the autumn it turns a gorgeous scarlet. It is destined to be one of the best landscape trees of California in our opinion. It grows to be centuries old.
Frank Meyer standing beside a tree which has stood three centuries at least. Imagine what pleasure he would have had had he only lived to walk under this great avenue in his old age.
The question of congeniality between the true pistache and the Chinese pistache is shown here. We rather jumped to the conclusion, when we found that the ordinary pistache overgrew the Chinese pistache, that perhaps it was not so good a stock as we first thought, but I notice, looking back at my photograph taken in Greece in 1901, that the regular stocks used by the Greeks for the pistache are overgrown in the same way by the true pistache. We have much larger trees than these now in Chico and as the Chinese pistaches are very old and large trees we have come to the conclusion that in all probability the pistache will be successful on this Chinese stock.
I was walking through a market in Hong Kong in 1902 and I saw a few bushels of nuts that I had never heard of or seen before. The nuts looked like acorns but when I picked them up I found them as hard as hickory nuts. I cracked one of them with a brick and it was almost as hard to crack as a hickory nut. It was unmistakably an acorn, I thought, and I bought a bushel of the nuts and sent them to this country. It is called Pisania by botanists and it has many of the characteristics of an acorn. The kernel of this nut comes out whole and for that reason it would be very easily cracked by mechanical means. It has a sweetness which does not suggest an acorn. It does not remind you of the acorn. It is a commercial product in Southern China shipped down the West river and it seemed to me well worth while trying to grow it in the United States. We have had a great deal of trouble with it. We did not find the right place for it at first. It was hardy here in Washington, even, for a few seasons but the temperature at seventeen, eighteen and twenty below zero finally killed it out. It is now growing down in Mississippi.
Here is a photograph sent me from Honkong, the only one I have of the tree as it appears on the hills of Honkong. This tree which is now 11 feet tall on the place of Mr. Joe Williams at Langdon, Mississippi, is one of the few that is now growing in the United States. There is one in Southern California. It probably would be perfectly hardy along the Gulf coast. Just how good a bearer it is going to prove I do not know but it is very interesting even to register the fact that the plant is established in the Southern States.
The Macadamia ternifolia, or Queensland nut, is not quite so well known in Queensland as I thought it was. A very brilliant young man from Australia, by the name of Johnston, passed through my office the other day and I showed him the photograph of the Macadamia and to my chagrin he did not know much about it, although he was a very good botanist and a very keen man. He said "We do not pay much attention to these things over there." That is really characteristic of many of the foreign plants that we have brought in. They are not developed in their own countries any more than some of the fruits which we have in this country are not developed by us. Mr. Littlepage and I are going out in a day or two to see if we can find some larger papaws. Now the papaw has been just as badly neglected by the Americans as the Macadamia by the Australians and it may be that the only way to get the papaw developed is to send it to some other country and get them to develop it. We do not always develop our own possibilities.
This is a tree grown in Avon Park, Florida. It interests me very much because it looks as if it would be a good bearer, is suited to the sandy lands of southern and central Florida, seems to be quite hardy and is a beautiful nut. It will vie with any other edible nut that I know of. This tree is in the Royal Palm Gardens in Palm Beach. The trees were brought in by us about 1905 or 1906.
This is a tree in Cuba where it is perfectly at home.
This gives you an idea of the character of the nut in a bunch. This is the nut. The shells when opened are as attractive as anything I know of. This is a very thick walled variety. We have much thinner walled forms that have come from Hawaii where it is now being grown. The dark part is a maroon brown and the lighter part is a brilliant creamy yellow. Altogether it is an extremely attractive nut, an excellent eating nut and has very good food qualities. We have had them analyzed, and all the data are at the disposal of you gentlemen at any time you wish to consult our files.
One of the first pieces of foreign work I was asked to do for the government was to get and import the hard-shelled almonds of Spain. Most of you have eaten the Jordan almond and I imagine most of you think it comes from California, but there are very few Jordans grown in California and, so far as the investigations go which I have been able to make in California in co-operation with the candy manufacturers, I have discovered that the California growers are not growing the best almond in the world. That the IXL and the Nonpareil and other almonds are not considered sufficiently good for such men as Lowney to use in the manufacture of their almond candies was a surprise to me. And the reason? In the first place the skin of the kernel itself is too thick, the nut is too brittle and it has not the flavor of the imported nut. I was shocked the other day to read from cover to cover a bulletin on the subject of Almonds, and to find that not one word was said of flavor. It had to be a good cracker; but the marketable qualities did not take into consideration the question of the flavor of the kernel, its hardness or the thickness of skin.
This picture on the screen was taken in southeastern Spain. These are the almond crackers of Spain and a poorer lot of people I have never visited in my life. The little children, not over four years old, instead of playing as ours play, carry around with them in their hands little bundles of wheat straw which they braid with their hands as they play, making sombreros which are shipped to the Argentine. It is a very poor country where these grow. The soil Is very thin and very dry and these almond trees grow on the hillsides. It was with an unpleasant feeling that I took these cuttings from southeastern Spain, and brought them to America. I got them from the trees that were bearing these almonds, they were budded in California and we know where the trees are growing in California from these buds.
This is a view in one of these hillside plantations of southeastern Spain with two of the almond growers.
This is a view in the plains region near Valencia showing both the hard shelled almonds and the soft shelled ones. The soft shelled are those which are easily cracked with the fingers while the hard shelled have to be broken with a hammer or an instrument. It is these hard shelled almonds that we have been interested in getting.
I have not kept in touch with this almond situation as I would have if I had been a specialist on almonds instead of spreading my energies out over the whole field and it is time someone really got into the almond business. I once traveled fifty miles from Bobadilla, Spain to the next railway station between solid walls of seedling almonds in bloom. No American has ever been to these seedling orchards to see what they are. It should be possible to find in those rows that are now 25 years old late flowering varieties which would be adapted to the conditions in California or early flowering varieties which would cross pollinate the Jordan almond. But we have not had the extra man with which to do this and carry out the other things we have been obliged to do. The interesting thing about this Jordan almond is that it behaves differently in our country than it does over in Spain. You notice how smooth each one of these almonds is. There is no sharp keel on the Spanish grown Jordan almond at all. It is smooth all around. Here are the almonds grown in California from the scions which I brought in. You see how these "keels" are developed and the nut has also become more pointed. We have not had an opportunity to investigate this thing thoroughly, but I am convinced that this is an environmental effect. Dr. W. A. Taylor has suggested that the fact that the Jordan flowers before any other variety comes out may mean that the California nuts are the result of self fertilization and this self fertilization may be the cause of their different shape and texture. Either that or the bud wood which I brought over from Spain was not representative of the Jordan variety although I picked it from trees that were bearing these nuts and I saw the nuts and they were typical. Of course it is possible that on the bud stocks which I brought over there was this hereditary tendency to produce these keels. However, we have made importations of the Jordan almond since then with the same result. One of these was grown in California in the desert region and one in Niles where John Rock, the great pioneer horticulturist of California, had his orchards. Both of them behaved in the same way. I sent some of the best kernels from these imported Jordan almonds to Mr. Lowney, the candy manufacturer who imports large quantities of Jordan almonds from Spain, and he reported that he could not use them for his candy manufacture because they were too hard and the skin too tough.
One of the most interesting experiences of my life was in 1903 when I visited a French barber in a little town called Nevada City, California, in the foothills of the Sierras. He had come over to this country without a penny and had set up a barber shop in this little mining village of Nevada City. He had saved from his fees for cutting people's hair and shaving them, $3,000. He had bought a piece of barren hillside which everybody laughed at him for buying; and he sent an order for $2,500 worth of nut trees and fruit trees to a nursery firm in his old home in France. He did this without even having an irrigating system with which to irrigate those plants when they arrived. He told me with tears in his eyes how he had worked night and day, carrying buckets of water to save this collection of plants when it arrived from France. When I visited Felix Gillett in his plantation there, which he called the Barren Hill Nursery, I felt that I had never seen a more delightful spot in my life. It was a kind of a paradise which he had built up by his love for plants and his wonderful knowledge of the varieties which he handled. He certainly was one of the great experts of this country in the nut and fruit industry, particularly the nut industry. It is his collection of hazelnuts which Mr. Reed spoke of as having found its way into Mr. Quarnburg's hands. In fact I was at Mr. Quarnburg's place a year ago last summer and learned that he got his first start from this little French barber in the mountains of Nevada.
This is Felix Gillett standing beside the first Jordan almond tree in America. The difficulty with the Jordan tree in this section was that it flowered too early and too few crops were produced. We have tried a good many sections for the almond and one of the problems, in my opinion, is the development of stocks for it. Here is the IXL on one of Meyer's Chinese stocks (Amygdalus davidiana). It does very well on this stock in the region of San Antonio, Texas. But the future of this almond business ought to have been told you by Meyer after he came back from his trip in Western China. These bushes are of the Tangutian almond, a little bush almond; growing occasionally 15 or 18 or 20 feet in height and hardy. It was Meyer's plan, had he lived, to find some place in Southwest Colorado in which to breed hardy almonds that would cover those hillsides with a food producing plant. I believe had he lived he would have done that for we have gotten together already for the breeders a number of forms of great promise. Mr. Wight of the Office of Pomological Investigations is now in California doing breeding work, and I hope his life will be spared so that he can produce a practical bush almond. My object in throwing this photograph on the screen is to show you a hillside covered with a food producing plant which has never yet received the attention of human beings, and yet if studied might lead to the production of an entirely new type of almond which will probably grow as far north as the Dakotas.
Jumping from the Dakotas to Florida I want to introduce to you the Candle Nut or Kukui nut of the Hawaiian Islands which is growing in the sandy regions of the tropical belt of Florida. If you will read the literature you will find that it is referred to as a cathartic, resembling in this respect the castor bean. The problem is whether the candle nut as grown in Florida is poisonous or not. Prof. Simpson is growing in his yard in Florida a tree of this Kukui nut and has eaten these nuts for years, and he just sent me a couple quarts of them from his tree and I have tried them on my friends with no injurious results whatever. The thing to look out for is this fetish, this superstition of poison. This is a very hard-shelled nut, very oily and resembles somewhat the Brazil nut. If a market can be made for it, and there does not seem to be any reason why there cannot, there is no reason that they cannot be grown and they will be grown in southern Florida. That country which in 1898 was a wilderness is now developing very rapidly as a region of homes and what they want is plants that they can grow down there that they can live upon.
On the left is one of these trees which has a good many nuts on it. It is in Miami, Florida. This is a branch of one of these Kukui nuts in Miami.
This is probably the least known of any of the nuts. It is the Yeheb nut. It belongs to the order of Leguminosae and they tell us it is so sweet, having between 21 and 22 per cent of sugar, that the native Arab will desert his dates and rich diet, which is the ordinary diet of that region, and take to the Yeheb whenever it comes into fruit. This Yeheb shrub grows in the deserts of Italian Somaliland and ought to succeed in our southwestern country. During the war there was attached to the Italian Embassy the Italian Explorer Captain Vanutelli, who had the distinction of having been captured by a savage chief in Abyssinia and bound for over two months to a black Abyssinian slave. When I spoke to him about this Yeheb nut he said, "Yes, I have eaten it. It is a wonderful nut. Some day I will get you some of it." When the shipment came there were two tons of nuts and I was a little surprised to say the least. They were brought on camel back over the deserts. During the war they took eight or nine months to get to Washington and when they arrived they were all dead. Notwithstanding many attempts this nut is not grown in the United States but we will have it. It is very thin-shelled, the kernels come out whole and have a very sweet, delicate flavor.
You have just come from Dr. Van Fleet's chestnuts. You know that this is the Chinese chestnut (Castanea mollissima) which Meyer found in China. Dr. Van Fleet would probably tell you this is not the way to prune them if you want to increase the chances of these Chinese chestnuts withstanding the bark disease. You are probably familiar with the fact that Meyer discovered over in China on this species the original chestnut bark disease which has destroyed our chestnuts in this country. He found that this variety was highly resistant but not entirely immune to the disease. Dr. Galloway, who is handling the propagation and distribution of these Chinese chestnuts, for our office, wishes to have it understood that in the distribution of these which we will make in the spring we desire to have them sent out in blocks; we would rather not distribute these Chinese chestnuts in single specimens but would be very glad to consider offers from people who have a quarter or a half of an acre that they want to plant. We want to get some idea of the behavior of this species as an orchard crop.
This illustrates the way, as I understand it, that Dr. Van Fleet thinks the trees should be treated, on the left; the way they should not be treated on the right. They seem to be much more susceptible to the disease when pruned up in this neat orchard fashion.
One of Meyer's photographs taken at Fanshan, northeast of Pekin, where he found the chestnut bark disease. This is the way the trees appeared. This gives you some idea of the size of Chinese chestnuts which he got. Those back on the hills are all Chinese chestnuts on rather poor soil as he explains in his description of the photographs.
This is an orchard of Chinese chestnuts as planted by the Chinese on the richer soils of the low lands which show larger trees. Even when full sized they do not compare with our American chestnut but are old enough to show you that they have not been killed by this bark disease.
These trees show signs of the disease but that they have a high degree of resistance is apparently beyond dispute. This shows the black scar near the top which Meyer diagnoses as the remains of the chestnut bark disease.
The scar there in the crotch of this chestnut tree indicates the degree of resistance of this species. Just how it is going to behave here in America no one can tell but that it would be possible to grow orchards of these Chinese chestnuts with the care which you exercise in growing pears or even peaches I think is a pretty safe guess.
Meyer remarks that this tree is probably a century old and with signs of this disease on it. Here is one that he marks as between two and three centuries old.
This, gentlemen, is the newest arrival in this country coming from East Africa near Zanzibar. In Curtis's magazine there is published an account of this nut after Mr. Playfair a British subject who had lived on the island of Zanzibar. This is one of the most curious and most interesting nuts that has been brought to our attention.
It is borne by a climbing vine the stem of which sometimes reaches six or seven inches in diameter. The fruit is between two and one-half and three feet long and eight inches in diameter, and bears between 250 and 264 of these large seeds about the size of chestnuts and with a delicate flavored. In 1884 this Mr. Playfair sent some of these nuts to England, but we have just discovered them so to speak. They will probably grow in our tropical possessions and we must not overlook the fact that after all there is a distinct drift in our agriculture towards the development of that part of the globe which has been so overlooked by horticulturists in the past. It is not at all impossible that some of you who are here in this audience today will buy that Playfairia on the markets.
I thank you very much indeed for your attention.
The President: The hour is late. What Dr. Kellogg may have to say I know will interest you all greatly but it might better be said tomorrow when we are fresh and the attendance will probably be larger than it is this evening. If there is nothing further to come before the meeting tonight we will take a recess until 9:30 in the morning.
The convention adjourned until 9:30 a. m. Friday, October 8.
Morning Session Friday October 8, 1920
The session was called to order by President Linton at 10 o'clock.
The President: I wish first to beg the pardon of the membership of the Association for the little time that I have been able to give to the preparation of this particular paper. To illustrate how limited that time has been, starting from Michigan prior to our meeting yesterday I had less than twenty-four hours to get to Washington. It was necessary that I should call a meeting together at a little town in Michigan where the regular train did not stop. In order to get that train it was necessary to send a man to buy a ticket to that particular point and as he climbed off that train I climbed on. The conductor thought we should be held up for a conspiracy for stopping a train of that character. On reaching Detroit there were a few minutes between trains. After landing in Buffalo I found that there were fifteen minutes to make connections, and after getting on that train I found our good Brother Pomeroy aboard and he had some fine drinks and other things from his home farm so that it was really the midnight hour before I could commence on this document.