DR. BRITTON: May I say to you that our good wishes for your association, expressed at that time, are simply repeated now, and we hope that you will make yourselves at home and as comfortable as possible. We have made arrangement for the convention to leave here about one o'clock, for luncheon at Sormani's as guests of the Botanical Society. The autos will be at the door promptly, so I trust that you will adjust the session so as to be free to leave then.
THE PRESIDENT: We wish to extend our thanks to Dr. Britton for his kind remarks and for his hospitality.
We will now have the secretary read reports from our state vice-presidents.
THE SECRETARY: These are very interesting. The first one is from Mrs.
Ellwanger, our state vice-president for New York.
(Reading in part) "My walnut trees are doing well and have many more nuts than ever before. The filberts planted two years ago, also have some, and the chestnuts, those the blight have left me, are covered with burs. There are beech nuts, too.—I intend to keep on planting chestnut trees, in spite of the blight."
Mr. C. S. Ridgway, Lumberton, New Jersey, writes as follows:
"There are very few nut trees in our vicinity. In fact, very few except what I have—some large old pecans at Mt. Holley, but the fruit is so small they are not gathered."
The next letter is from Mr. Howard Spence, of Ainsdale, Southport,
England. Mr. Spence writes:
"During the last year I have got one of our horticultural research stations interested in the subject of walnut culture and just recently the headquarters of the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries also. The latter are using a small pamphlet on nut culture generally, to which I have contributed some facts. But a point of more definite interest at the moment is that the Minister has agreed to instruct all their inspectors over the country to make a collection of all walnuts of merit and forward them to me for classification and identification of varieties which may be worth perpetuating. As almost all the large number of trees in this country are seedlings I am hopeful that some interesting material may be located."
Here is a letter from Mr. Richard H. Turk, Vice-President for the state of Washington: