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404 CONNECTICUT EXPERIMENT STATION REPORT, IQI2. 
as compared with plants grown in Peru. Yet when plants from 
England were sent to India, their vigor was restored, and an 
increase of the alkaloids was shown by chemical analysis, 
especially in the descendants of plants sent there: ° 
McKenney (Science 31, p. 750) writes concerning the blight 
of Central American bananas: “The juice of diseased plants 
contains much less tannin than that of the normal plants. * * * 
It has been proved that the disease is not due to local conditions, 
such as too wet or too dry soil, etc. Yet some of these con- 
ditions may predispose the plants to the disease.” He does 
not say whether the lessened tannic acid is the result of the 
disease or vice versa. 
Tannic Acid and its Relationship to Chestnut Blight. The 
chestnut as a source of tannin is one of our most important 
trees. However, it seems that most of this tannin is made 
from the chestnuts in the South, although they are utilized as 
far north as Pennsylvania. The reason for this is that the 
chestnuts in the South furnish a greater percentage of tannin 
than those in the North. At least one cause for this seems to 
be that the older the trees the greater the percentage of tannic 
acid, since the tannin is made from the ground wood and 
apparently comes largely from the older wood. As a rule, the 
chestnuts of the South are much older than those of the North, 
and are more likely to be seedlings. As yet the chestnut blight 
has not caused much harm in the South. Whether or not the 
present of more tannic acid in the trees there has any rela- 
tionship to the absence of the blight is as yet uncertain, but 
there is a possibility of its having a direct bearing. 
In answer to a question regarding variation of tannic acid 
in chestnut trees, Mr. F. Veitch, of the Leather and Paper 
Laboratory of the United States Department of Agriculture, 
writes me as follows: “I have your letter of the 11th inst. 
asking for the tannin content of chestnut wood. This differs 
all the way from 2 per cent. to as high as 10 or 12 per cent. in 
very old, dry chestnut. The chestnut wood used by extract 
makers probably averages around 6 per cent. of tannin. I can 
make no more definite statement regarding the tannin content 
of any particular chestnut than to say that young chestnut as 
a tule contains the least, while the old chestnut contains the 
highest percentage of tannin. Only the body and large limbs 
