I bought a great many other trees, among them some of Mr. Pomeroy's. I had a hard fight with Pomeroy's trees. They would die down one year and grow a foot or a foot and a half the next and then die down again. But each year they increased a little in size and now they are over my head and are not dying down at all.
I tried a lot of others, among which were seedling English walnuts from St. Catherine's. They did not freeze down at all, but whether they will throw as good a nut as Mr. Pomeroy's I don't know. They are certainly a different nut.
Then I got a Chinese walnut of Black's nursery, Hightstown, New Jersey, and it is growing remarkably well. All three types of trees are doing very well and are all over my head, sometimes growing three or four feet a year, very rarely less than a yard from each terminal branch, and I have had no winter killing.
It may be interesting to recount a few other things about my place. I had an awful fight with mice. My land is in a valley and the spring floods come down and I can't plow the land or it would all be washed away. I put a tree in and protect it with a certain amount of space around it. I found that the mice would chew down the trees almost as fast as I could get them in, so I got some cats. The cats soon learned to prefer birds to mice so I killed the cats. Then I bought a flock of geese and the geese cropped the grass short and prevented it from growing so powerfully as to smother out the trees. But the geese had hard bills and when the trees were small they clipped off pieces of bark with their bills, so I traded the geese for wild geese. I learned that they are more discriminating in their choice of food and that though their wings are more powerful their bills are not as strong. They have kept the grass down for me and destroyed the homes of the mice. Then I got pheasants in order to rid myself of the insect pests. I feel that in another ten or twenty years we will have a very beautiful place.
I need not refer to the fact that nuts are very valuable for food.
Dentists would all go out of business if we ate nuts.
Pennsylvania is a state which should certainly take up with its agricultural authorities the possibilities of nut growing because that is a state that can be ruined utterly by trying to grow grain on the hillsides. The water comes down and washes all the rich top soil off into the creeks and it is lost to us and our children.
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THE PRESIDENT: Will the secretary please read Doctor Kellogg's paper?
THE SECRETARY: Mr. President, this is a very long paper and I have not read it over. It seems to me that perhaps we have devoted so much time to genealogy and reminiscences that the time is short for the papers which are to be read by members present. Would it not be well to defer the reading of this paper of Doctor Kellogg's to a later time, or, possibly, merely print it in the proceedings?
DOCTOR MORRIS: I move it be laid upon the table and printed in the proceedings.