Col. Sober: No sir, but we are doing it now, using white lead.
A member: How much blight is there around you?
Col. Sober: I am surrounded with it on all sides. Right up against my groves about 17 per cent of the trees are affected. That is the report coming from the parties inspecting now for the Blight Commission. I shipped Mr. Mayo about four or five thousand trees this fall. I don't suppose there were a dozen that were thrown out, thinking they were blighted or diseased. We have records of all that up at my place. There are some trees right here now that came from my nursery. I wish you gentlemen could just see for yourselves; come out and see.
The Chairman: In advancing this chestnut on a commercial basis it had better be stated that it does not blight as badly as the American chestnut and that when blighted it can be cared for with less cost than the apple tree. I would suggest that some such notice be sent out with commercial stock. That would put it on the right basis so that the chestnut would find its position, which it is not finding now because the people are full of the blight; and if a frank, full statement of this sort were made I believe it would be extremely important.
Mr. Rockey: I went through practically the whole extent of Mr. Sober's orchard recently and found one infected tree. I can vouch for the statement that he has made that he is almost surrounded by blight.
The Chairman: I have given attention to only a few of my own trees that were blighted because I have too much else to do and too large a place, a couple of hundred acres engaged in a small and large way,—a variety of ways—with nut trees; and the few I have cared to save after blight has begun I have saved by cutting it out very thoroughly and using either white paint or grafting wax. I used also pine tar and some gas tar. I killed some good trees that I wanted particularly to save by putting on gas tar.
The matter of compelling the removal of infected trees is a very important one, but it must rest with the authorities. In the vicinity of New York we have so much hard wood that you cannot sell it unless you are in some sort of a trade combination. Fine oak, fine hickory, fine chestnut, you can't dispose of in New York City, because we have such a lot of it. We have wild deer within fifteen miles of New York City on three sides of us on account of the forests. You have got to find some special way for disposing of this blighted chestnut timber. Telephone and telegraph poles and ties all go for nothing, unless you happen to be so situated that you can manage the matter commercially, and a way should be found by the state so that people can dispose of their blighted timber, which is just as good as any other.
It is very important to note that the boy scouts are interested, and we ought to encourage their interest. It is a splendid thing, getting the interest of boys engaged. You know how active a boy is in getting a snake from under a rock and he will do the same thing with the chestnut blight. It is his natural tendency to hustle when he gets after anything. This chestnut blight belongs to the microbe group and the microbe is the great enemy of mankind. In wars the microbe kills about eight men for every one killed by missiles. If we can encourage the interest of boy scouts in fighting the greatest of all human enemies, the microbe, including this little fungus, we shall have a splendid working force.
In regard to the injection of poisons and medicines into trees, it seems to me that a very firm stand ought to be taken by all responsible men who know anything about plant pathology. We know that a poison injected into a tree must either act injuriously right there upon the cells of the tree, or else must undergo metabolic changes. A tree cannot use anything that is thrown into it, poison or food or anything else, until it has undergone a metabolic change; you must have a distinct, definite chemical process taking place and we ought to state that most of the substances which are alleged to be of value, when injected into a tree, are either absolutely worthless or injurious. One man tried to persuade me that his medication if applied to the cambium layer would be absorbed, and said that if I would only use it on a few of my trees I could see for myself. He said it would drive off even the aphides. I tried it on four trees affected with aphides and found that he told me the truth. It drove them off, because the trees died and the aphides left. One tree lived a year before being killed; it was a most insidious sort of death, but the aphides left that tree. (Laughter.)
Some of the Asiatic chestnuts resist the blight very well. Curiously enough when grafted upon some of the American chestnuts they then become vulnerable. Two years ago, from a lot of about one thousand Corean chestnuts in which there had been up to that time no blight, I grafted scions on American stump sprouts and about 50 per cent of those grafts blighted in the next year, showing that the American chestnut sap offers a pabulum attractive to the Diaporthe, and that is a fact of collateral value in getting our negative testimony upon the point.