The meeting was very enjoyable. They have a very fine system there. They hire big buses to take you around over the country. Your hotel is all arranged for in advance, and you go sightseeing to the orchards and utilization plants. We have meetings just here and there along the way where we stop a half day or a day.
The next meeting will probably be held in about two years. They have decided now that the meetings will be more in the way of conferences, because the last three meetings have been partly sightseeing to observe chestnut orchards and laboratories.
The possibility of holding the meeting in the United States has been discussed by the delegates there. But it involves a lot of expense and the delegates were of the opinion that there would be a very small meeting in the United States, because the countries over there simply couldn't afford the expense of sending them over here.
The problem in Italy is very serious, because they have something over a million acres of grafted chestnut orchards, all of which they are probably going to lose, and something like a million acres of coppice growth that is going to be damaged but not such a severe loss. In connection with the work in Italy I suggested the production of a movie film that could be shown to the Italian people showing the chestnut industry and also the chestnut blight. This was to be shown in different parts of Italy to arouse more interest in watching out for the disease. They have more opportunity there of slowing up the disease if they will work hard at it, but they are not doing too much.
As some of you know when a lot of different people and agencies work on a movie film there must be all sorts of compromises. This was done by a temperamental Italian director, and other people had parts in it, so what you see is a compromise. They made 30 copies in Italian. H has been shown in many moving picture houses, and it is also on the loan basis to the United States. There are extensive film loan libraries, located in different parts of Italy, so any high school, college forestry group can borrow films showing different operations, many of them prepared in the United States and part of them in Italy.
DR. MACDANIEL: What about this so-called Korean chestnut? Is it actually a third species?
DR. GRAVATT: I don't think so, We had quite a bit of argument on this question, because in Spain where I found chestnut blight on chestnuts brought from Japan, we found the name Korean chestnut. Sometimes the Korean chestnut looks more like a Jap, sometimes it looks more like a Chinese, and usually it's sort of a blend between the two. We prefer to recognize these two species and call the Korean a natural hybrid. Both species are grown in pure form in Korea, and they intercross readily, and we do not regard it as a new species.
MR. WILSON: Are the Italian enough aware of their problem so that they will have developed an Asiatic chestnut in time to replace their present orchards, so that there will not be an interim?
DR. GRAVATT: There will be a big interim. That's an opportunity in this country to get the market before the Italians ever come back, I think.
(The film, "It Bringeth Forth Much Fruit" was shown.)