LUTHER BURBANK 
the reader has already heard; and climbing black- 
berries and yellow and red fruited raspberries that 
had.a share in the development of some fruits that 
presently attained commercial importance. 
But perhaps there was nothing in the entire 
consignment that was destined to produce seed- 
lings with more interesting possibilities of devel- 
opment than the 25 “monster” chestnuts. For the 
hereditary factors that these nuts bore were to 
have an important influence in developing new 
races of chestnuts of strange habits of growth— 
chestnuts dwarfed to the size of bushes, yet bear- 
ing mammoth nuts, and of such precocity of habit 
as sometimes to begin bearing when only six 
months from the seed. 
To be sure other chestnut strains were blended 
with the Japanese before these anomalous results 
were produced; but it is certain that the oriental 
parents had a strong influence in determining 
some at least of the most interesting peculiarities 
of the new hybrid races. 
Very Mixep ANCESTRY 
That the antecedents of the precocious chest- 
nuts may be clearly revealed, let me say at the 
outset that the Japanese forms were hybridized 
with the three other species as soon as they were 
old enough to be mated, and that the hybrids in 
turn were crossed and recrossed until the strains 
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