51 
As will be seen from Table IT, the best percentage of successful 
results was obtained from the Folk trees. These are splendid 
sturdy specimens, and should be used again if this work is con- 
tinued. The Minturn tree is also a fine individual, and although 
the results thus far have been discouraging, the experimentation 
with it has been too limited to have any decisive value. 
Self Sterility im the Chestnut—For a long time it has been 
common knowledge that isolated chestnut trees bear no fruit, or, 
at most, only a few nuts. Large crops of burs may be produced, 
but the nuts inside the burs contain no “ meats” or embryos. At 
the present time both the Smith tree and the Minturn tree, of 
the Oyster Bay region, bear only a few sound nuts each year. Mr. 
Smith reported that in September of last year (1931) about eight 
bushels of burs were raked up from the ground, which contained 
only empty shells of nuts. However, a few had sound nuts, and 
these—about 50 in all—he kindly saved for us. Some of them 
were sent to the U. S. Department of Agriculture, and the rest 
have been planted in our greenhouses for comparison of their seed- 
ling stages with those of the bagged nuts secured from the same 
tree. Mr. Smith tells us that formerly the tree bore large crops 
of good nuts. When one considers the large numbers of healthy 
American chestnut trees which, before the advent of the blight, 
flourished in the woods nearby, it seems a well warranted conclu- 
sion that their pollen, carried by the wind or by insects to Mr. 
Smith’s Japanese tree, was the essential factor in its fertility. The 
same condition of affairs, although to a lesser degree, is true of the 
Minturn tree. Formerly it bore fair crops of nuts. The native 
chestnut trees were here obviously not so close at hand. In the 
Hammond tree one of the leaders is a graft, which differs from the 
other leader (the original stock) in size of leaves, burs, number of 
nuts in the bur, to a slight extent in the time of flowering, and also 
in other characters. We have here what amounts essentially to 
two different trees, therefore, and natural cross-pollination occurs. 
The yield of nuts each year is good. What was said of the Smith 
tree applies also to the Winthrop tree—now an isolated individual. 
It is a most significant fact both from the standpoint of sterility 
and, on the other hand, in favor of the success of our pollination 
work, that the only nuts developed on this tree during the past two 
err 
