u speak of airing the scions. How long do you do
that?

MR. HARRINGTON: It depends on the conditions that require the
airing. For instance a thaw in the winter, or a rainy spell. Again in
the summer a long rainy spell. In these cases I open up the box, maybe
leave it a couple of hours.

DR. SMITH: That kills the mold, two hours' exposure? You never
sterilize the inside in any way?

MR. HARRINGTON: I never have. It might be a good idea. The mold
doesn't seem to affect the scions.

EXPERIMENTS AND OBSERVATIONS IN SEARCHING FOR BEST SEEDLING NUT TREES

_J. F. Wilkinson, Indiana_

Searching for the best seedling began long before the coming of the
white man to America, by Indians and animals and the birds which store
nuts for their winter food. This search has always been continued
through the nut growing territory by the crows, squirrels and other
birds and animals.

Go to a pecan grove early in the fall when pecans are ripening and there
is no better evidence that a tree is an early ripener and produces a
thin shelled nut than to see a bunch of crows feeding from it.

The children living near a pecan grove in early fall will go where crows
and birds are feeding to gather nuts that are dropped by them, and
later, when all trees have ripened their nuts, these children have their
favorite trees to gather from. I have seen the little ones around
Enterprise, of before school age, that would have a preference and could
select from a basket of pecans the ones from their favorite tree. It is
surprising how good their judgment is.

The hunter also watches this in the early hunting season, going to the
earlier ripening hickory and walnut trees, for it is there he will find
the squirrels feeding.

My own experience in gathering pecans dates back to my first school
days, for there were scores of pecans trees near the school building,
and as soon as I was large enough to climb a tree I spent many days each
fall gathering nuts and soon had a fair knowledge of all trees for a
radius of several miles around.

The first trees of the now named varieties, the Indiana and Busseron,
were located and brought to notice by the late Mason J. Niblack.

In the summer of 1910 my life-long friend, Mr. T. P. Littlepage, while
on a vacation, was camping on the Ohio river near my home and was then
very much interested in superior seedling nut trees. It was at that
time, in a talk with him, that I became interested in the propagati