56 The Journal 
we have been gotng 1t blind. Now we can 
go at it with our eyes open. If by 
chance we have in unknown centuries 
turned a small nut “‘with a thick hard 
shell and small kernel, scarcely edible”’ 
into the splendid one for which we pay 
25 or 30 cents per pound, what may we 
do if we use our known powers of cross 
breeding and hybridizing? Is it not 
reasonable for us now to expect to be 
able to produce as great changes in 
twenty-five or fiftv years as chance has 
done for us in twenty-five or fifty 
centuries ¢ 
The Persian walnut, this golden gift 
of chance breeding, is a grossly neglected 
agent. 
This nut is great in its economic 
significance, for the future, and con- 
sidering its possibilities it is equally 
great in its agricultural insignificance in 
the present. Its food value places it 
very high among foods, because of its 
high percentage of meat in comparison 
to waste, and its combination of food 
elements, furnishing as it does the costly 
protein and the much coveted fat. 
Further than this, the tree produces one 
of the most valuable of woods. 
In operation it shows up as a veritable 
engine of food production, a single good 
tree in France commonly yielding as 
many pounds of human food per year as 
is given by the meat produced by an 
acre of pasture in England. Of the two 
foods the walnut is more nutritious by 
the ratio of 2to 1. Grafted trees of the 
Mayette and other varieties scattered 
about the fields of France have been 
making these heavy yields for many 
decades. 
The range of the tree serves to 
emphasize the unrealized possibilities. 
The Persian walnut with these wonder- 
ful qualities of heavy yield of rich food 
and good wood is at home in a wide belt 
which encircles the globe in both 
hemispheres. The tree is actually found 
all through the Mediterranean region of 
Zurope, in Asia Minor, Central Asia, 
China, and Japan, in Pacific America 
and in the Eastern United States from 
Georgia to Ontario. It also grows in 
2See reports of, Northern Nut Growers’ 
Secretary, Georgetown, Conn. 
of Heredity 
the South Temperate zone. It has been 
known from ancient times, and yet it 
has been developed as a crop only in a 
few areas, as in Southern France, Italy 
(near Naples), California (chiefly near 
Los Angeles), and the Orient. I doubt 
if there is a 10-acre orchard of grafted 
walnut trees under one management in 
all Europe. I have been in all the 
leading districts and found none so 
large, merely little patches and scattered 
trees. 
IN EASTERN AMERICA 
In the eastern United States there 
have been scattered trees producing 
good crops for many years. Trees of 
local repute have recently been reported 
from Ontario, Michigan, New York, 
New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland 
and Georgia. Some of them are of 
great size and over a century old? 
Some of these trees are reported to be 
practically annual bearers, yet thus far 
the nut has strangely failed in becoming 
the basis of a regular crop in the eastern 
United States. This fact has had two 
causes, chief of which is the past 
dependence upon seedlings, which are 
indefinitely variable, and in the eastern 
United States mostly worthless, because 
of unacclimated seed; and its great 
susceptibility to frost, due to its early 
blossoming. These causes have resulted 
in the failure of numerous commercial 
attempts dependent upon seedlings. 
As an instance of this I will cite my 
own ill-guided experience. In 1896 I 
planted two acres in northern Virginia 
of the best seedling Persian walnut trees 
I could then secure from a New Jersey 
nursery. They were 3 to 4 feet high. 
The next year they were 21% feet high, 
the next year they were 11% feet high. 
Then they began gradually to disappear. 
The last one lingered until 1912, when a 
temperature of 25° F. snuffed out its 
worthless and despairing life. It grew 
in a magnificent, rich spot and attained 
the height of 9 feet. Most of the new 
growth winter-killed annually and it 
never bore a nut. There were no 
grafted trees to be had at that time and 
Association, 1912-1913, Dr. W. ©. Deming, 
