194 THE NUT CUITUEIST 



the rule, although in a favorable soil and climate it is to 

 be expected that such trees will push forward more rap- 

 idly than under less favorable conditions. Grafted trees 

 will, of course, produce fruit in less time than seedlings, 

 and as this mode of propagation becomes more general, 

 and repeated in a direct ancestral line, the cions for each 

 successive generation of trees being taken from mature 

 or bearing specimens, the precocious and productive 

 habit will eventually become intensified, as it has been 

 in all of our long-cultivated fruit trees propagated by 

 artificial methods. We have so intensified the produc- 

 tiveness of many kinds of cultivated fruits by selection, 

 that it has become more of a fault, than a merit to be 

 encouraged. 



The nut trees are amenable to the same physiolog- 

 ical laws as other kinds, and in their propagation by 

 grafting with cions from bearing specimens we hasten 

 maturity in the offspring. This has been fully demon- 

 strated in many varieties of the Persian walnuts and 

 European chestnuts. Here in the N"orthern States we 

 have had so little experience with grafted hickories of 

 any species, that really nothing is yet known as to how 

 they will respond to this mode of propagation, further 

 than that they grow rapidly and give promise of being 

 fruitful. Seedling trees are, as a rule, of slow growth, 

 rarely attaining a bearing age and size under twenty 

 years, and with the shellbarks thirty or forty years usu- 

 ally pass before anything like a crop of nuts is gathered. 

 Something may be gained, in the way of time, by fre- 

 quent transplan tings and pruning, but more by grafting 

 seedlings from old and mature trees. Two grafts of the 

 Hales' hickory commenced bearing at the age of sixteen 

 years. 



Planting for Profit. — There are, doubtless, many 

 thousands of acres of half-denuded woodlands in almost 

 every State in the Union, both North and South, that 



