Is the Disease Resistance Here an Hereditary Character?
As to whether this disease resistance is an inherent character and will be transmitted from generation to generation, or is only the result of particularly favorable environmental conditions such as soil, light or moisture, is a point of great practical importance. I believe that further work will prove that the resistance is heritable, for the following reasons:
1. The resistance is not due to a particularly favorable environment of the trees, for the three groups grow in very different soils and under varying conditions of light and moisture.
2. The finding of the trees in colonies points to a genetic variation. At first I was unable to account for the grouping of the trees, for I had expected to find immune or resistant trees singly, here and there. But if we adopt the hypothesis of a heritable protoplasmic variation—something in their "blood," so to speak, the explanation is easy. We know that chestnut fruits or nuts do not travel far, like the seeds of willow, poplar, maple or ash, and therefore, in any given stand of chestnut, if we could go back from generation to generation into earlier time, most probably the majority of the trees would be found to have arisen from a common ancestor, although of course a few outsiders would have found their way into the group, carried by squirrels or other animals.
3. In a considerable number of cases all the members of the same group of coppice trunks from an old stump show a similar degree of resistance. To attribute such a condition as due merely to chance, occurring as often as it does, would be placing a pretty large burden on chance; and since the coppice trunks are all off-shoots of the same plant, the condition is what one would expect were the resistant quality in inherent character. A correspondence of degree of resistance was also noted, in the inoculations made on branches, trunk, and basal shoots of the same individual tree.
Experimental work is being carried on at Washington to test out the truth of this hypothesis, i. e. to see whether or not the disease resistance is really heritable. The work is being carried on in connection with the propagation of other resistant stock, Chinese, Japanese, etc.; and, as soon as the department is sure of the product, the results will be distributed to nut growers and others who are interested.
In the meantime we can all help by being on the lookout for resistant native trees. I believe they will be found in many places besides the New York region.