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gentleman correctly. It seems to me that that matter of the 

 drought would be much better tested by showing that, in locali- 

 ties of low, moist, abundantly watered soils, the trees had not 

 had blight. There must be many such localities of chestnut in 

 Connecticut where even the recent droughts of past years have 

 not subjected many trees to a dearth of water. 



THE CHAIRMAN : Can you answer that in a word, Pro- 

 fessor Clinton? 



PROFESSOR CLINTON: I was giving the various things 

 that weaken trees. Drought is one of them. We have had severe 

 droughts in Connecticut, and I hold that the situations that 

 have been the most moist have been the regions that have suffered 

 most from the drought, because when a tree is trained to live in 

 a moist place, during a drought it will suffer more than a tree 

 on higher land which has been used to dry soil. 



MR. CRANMER, of Pennsylvania: Mr. Chairman: While 

 still well on the sunny side of life's meridian, I distinctly re- 

 member, as a barefoot boy on a little farm on the eastern sea- 

 board of New Jersey, the advent of what was known then as 

 the Colorado beetle, commonly called the potato bug. As a little 

 boy about this high (indicating) I was put in between the rows 

 to catch those fellows and get them off the vines. Naturally 

 they appeared on the vines of other farmers in that section, and 

 many of the old fellows shook their heads in despair. They 

 said "We will never raise any more potatoes. The potato crops 

 are done in America.'' My father did not feel that way, although 

 I would have been pretty well satisfied if he had. He made me 

 hunt potato bugs, and then we later began to use the London 

 purple and the Paris green, and so forth. We are still raising 

 potatoes in New Jersey and other places throughout the United 

 States, with success. We still have specimens of the Colorado 

 beetle in the United States, but we expect to go on raising pota- 

 toes, and doing our best. So it seems to me, gentlemen, in rela- 

 tion to this chestnut bark blight, this chestnut tree disease, we 

 are not to hold up our hands in despair and listen to too much 

 of the expert advice and opinion that falls from the lips of our 

 university men. I come from a university myself, and I dare 

 say that. We have heard much to-day. There have been numer- 



