73 



of the Persian walnut among us is our changeable winter and spring. 

 Therefore trees like the peach and the Persian walnut, both natives 

 of Persia, do not do so well. You bring them here and they come 

 into growth with the first days of spring. Then along comes a frost 

 and of course there is great loss. But the Persian walnut has managed 

 to live through this changeable climate here in the East and in time 

 we can get varieties adapted to an industry if we keep working at it. 

 It is really at home on the Pacific Coast. As it has worked its way 

 into China, Korea and Japan, nature has doubtless done much there 

 to get varieties ready for us, for there the tree has had to survive 

 heat and humidity. 



Mr. Reed has come back from Cliina with a large number of seed 

 nuts which have been widely distributed for experimental purposes. 

 I have great hopes from those nuts. I expect that tl:ey are going to 

 have a high degree of relationship to the parents. 



How did those wild Persi in walnuts, worthless according to Sar- 

 gent, get to be so good ? 



I observed that throughout the old world the country is essentially 

 devoid of trees. For example I have ridden several hundred miles 

 through Persia and never saw a forest or anything that looked like a 

 forest. While there I saw a few walnut trees and they were in care- 

 fully kept gardens. There was no chance for stray pollination from 

 poor trees. Naturally if they grew seedlings they grew them from 

 good Persian walnuts. The pressure of water scarcity in a land of 

 meager irrigation urged tlieir cutting out all the bad trees and keeping 

 the best ones. Thus the available seed was hybridized from genera- 

 tion to generation from two good' parents. Here a fairly constant 

 tree breeding process has been going on perhaps from the time of 

 King Darius, several hundred years before Christ. The same thing 

 has probably happened in many of the Chinese and Japanese fruit 

 gardens. 



We have in America a problem of introduction and of breeding 

 from the introductions. We want to find the best trees throughout the 

 world for our particular use. In the ease of the Persian walnut here 

 in this part of the world we need to get two immunities, immunity 

 from early growth and therefore frost and winter kill nnd, secondly, 

 immunity from fungus attack. In getting fungus immunity we have a 



