y dead limbs
or anything of that kind.

THE PRESIDENT: Do you refer to Doctor Mandel's plant?

MR. VOLLERTSEN: No.

DOCTOR MORRIS: Stamford is a natural home of the hazel. Wild hazels fill
the fields to such an extent that they destroy pastures very often.
Hazel blight, therefore, is to be found there as an indigenous organism
or parasite. Among the native hazels it apparently attacks only those
that have been injured or are weakened by age or otherwise. That is the
common history where a plant has existed along with a parasite for
centuries or ages, a certain amount of tolerance is established by the
resistance of a few individual plants and the elimination of the others.
By natural selection the best survives.

Now when I brought some European hazels to this place a little over
twenty years ago they made a good start. In two or three years all were
attacked with blight and at the end of four or five years all were dead.
I spoke to Mr. Henry Hicks about it. He has a place on Long Island. Mr.
Hicks said, "I have given up foreign hazels. They are no use. They all
die. I don't try them." Whenever anybody says that to me it starts me
right off doing it. When they said we couldn't graft hickories I said,
"Well, here is something to do," and I did it. They said, "Well, we
couldn't raise hazels; we might as well give up." I said, "Well, here is
the best thing for us to do then." So again I got a small lot and
observed them day by day. Very soon the blight began to attack them. I
found it grew slowly and gave me plenty of time to cut it out. I
neglected some purposely to see how long it would take the blight to
girdle a limb and some of the larger limbs took two years. In all of the
limbs that were affected, in the hazels which I wished to save, I simply
cut out the blight with a sharp jackknife, painted the spot with a
little paint, an antiseptic or something of the sort, and had complete
control. In fact I found that I needed to go over my hazel bushes not
more than once a year to look after the blight, and in one day, or part
of a day, with a sharp jackknife I had absolute control of the blight.

There are some large European hazels that I have neglected and have
allowed the blight to get under way. Some of them are so resistant that
they bear very good crops notwithstanding the fact that they are
neglected and have the blight. Others have died. Therefore it is a
relative question, a question of relative immunity to th