Furthermore, the children must always be taken into consideration along with chinquapin questions. According to authorities on the subject of decadence, we do not care very much about the children in these days. If some old-fashioned folks still remain, and if these old-fashioned folks do not take any particular personal interest in the beautiful garden and lawn trees that America has held out towards us in the chinquapins, they may at least plant a few of them because of the social standing that will follow. How so? Well, you see, it's because the parents of elite children will run over for a little visit in order to find out why the children do not come home. Then again, we are kind to dumb animals when raising chinquapins. Squirrels and white-footed mice, crows and blue jays are full of enthusiasm for the nuts, and they will assume the responsibility of gathering the crop if the matter is left in their charge.
This is really a funny country; something of a joke of a country when you come to think of it. Instead of setting out trees that will become both useful and beautiful, in accordance with the old Greek ideal of combining beauty and utility we set out Norway spruces that will make people hate evergreens in general. We set out poplars and all sorts of bunches of leaves in our parks and along the highways, instead of trees still more beautiful that would yield tons of coupon dollars every autumn. De gustibus non est disputandum!
When experimenting with hybridization of chinquapins, I ran across a phenomenon of new interest to botanists, and quite accidentally. A number of clusters of pistillate flowers of the bush chinquapin had been covered with paper bags, but not pollenized because of a shortage of pollen. An active man with a good sense of neatness and order would have removed those bags merely for the sake of appearance, but I was lazy and allowed the bags to remain for two or three weeks. When they were finally removed, it was found that the branches had set quite full of fruit, although not so full as other branches that had been pollenized from oaks. We were evidently dealing with an instance of parthenogenesis. The flowers that had received oak pollen did not show any oak parentage later in their progeny, and it was observed in other experiments in other years that almost any cupuliferous pollen would start cells of the chinquapin ovary into division and into the development of fertile nuts, but without inclusion of the pollen cell in a gamete. For purposes of convenience in thinking I have temporarily called this phenomenon "stereochemic parthenogenesis." Apparently the propinquity of foreign pollen serves to stimulate a female cell into division, although the pollen cell retains fixed molecular identity, and does not fuse with the female cell. I need not bring up abstruse questions of chromatin or of subatomic influence here.
At Stamford the bush chinquapins begin to blossom regularly about the twelfth of June, irrespective of weather conditions. The tree chinquapins blossom a little later, but the alder-leaved chestnut may not blossom until July, later than the common American chestnut. The bush chinquapins begin to open their burs very regularly about the fifteenth of September; earlier than any other chestnuts. They bear at an early age, sometimes in their fifth summer.
Grafting and budding is easily done among all of the chestnuts as a rule, and this year I employed for the first time a large chinquapin bush for top-working with the choice Merribrooke variety of the common chestnut. Every one of the grafts caught, and some of them have grown tremendously. This introduces an interesting question. May we graft the common American chestnut upon bush chinquapin stocks and secure precocious bearing? In that case we shall have trees like the dwarf apple and pear trees that are readily pruned and sprayed.
The chinquapin is practically immune to the blight (Endothia parasitica.) Easily blighting varieties of choice American chestnuts may be grafted upon these blight resistant stocks in orchard form if my experiment proves to be a success. It will not lessen the vulnerability of the American chestnut, but dwarf trees will be within reach of the horticulturist's pruning knife and spray outfit. Orchards of fine varieties of the common chestnut may perhaps be maintained in this way until the present epidemic of Endothia has expended its protoplasmic energy, or until it has succumbed to microbic parasites of its own.
THE PRESIDENT: Are there any questions to put to Dr. Morris?
THE SECRETARY: I venture to say that a good many people have tried, in the north, to raise the chinquapin, and I would like to have Dr. Morris tell us what to do to get it to grow best, whether to buy the trees from the nurserymen, or to plant the nuts, and just how to do it.
PROF. C. P. CLOSE: I would like to ask Dr. Morris about those chinquapins that set without the application of pollen, whether they fill well and whether they sprout at planting?
MR. LITTLEPAGE: With us out in Maryland it isn't a question of producing the chinquapin; we cut the bushes down every year by the thousands; we have nothing at all against it, but we have found that the weevil has been absolutely unsurmountable with us. It is the only discouraging thing about it in this part of the country. Around Washington the chinquapin is a weed tree, and if you gather a peck of chinquapins you will find that the whole peck, in two weeks, have turned to weevils. Perhaps Dr. Morris can tell us what to do about that, and put us on the road to success.