on was unanimously
elected for 1953.

PRESIDENT MacDANIELS: I will now call upon our newly elected president
to come forward. It is usual at these meetings for the retiring
president to present the gavel to the incoming president, and here it
is. This gavel is made of pecan wood presented to the Association by Mr.
T. P. Littlepage, who was born in this locality. I hope you will have as
much fun and pleasure as president of the Association as I have had.
It's all yours.

MR. WILKINSON: That gavel was made from the wood of a pecan tree. Mr. T.
P. Littlepage planted the nut when he was 14 years old on a piece of
land that he inherited as a boy. I cut the wood and sent it to him in
Washington to have the gavel made of it.

Chestnut Breeding

Report for 1951-1952

ARTHUR H. GRAVES[18] and HANS NIENSTAEDT, _Connecticut Agricultural
Experiment Station, New Haven, Conn._

Weather Conditions

Two serious enemies of the chestnut, if we disregard parasitic
organisms, are drought and extreme cold. The winter of 1950-51 was
unusually mild--scarcely cold enough to freeze the ground. The
precipitation was plentiful during the winter months so that the water
table was sufficient to tide over a slightly dry June and a much more
serious drought in September and early October. But the latter dry
period came when the nuts were matured, or nearly so.

The winter of 1951-52 was again mild except for a short cold spell at
the end of January, with plentiful precipitation up to the first week of
June, and then a long drought with the driest July since 1944. However,
the heavy rainfall of August, 8.69 inches,[19] made amends for this,
and with the normal rainfall of 3.48 inches of September, prepared the
trees to endure the long drought of October and early November. This
serious drought,[20] which resulted in disastrous forest fires filling
the air with smoke over much of the New England States, came late,
however, after the nuts were nearly matured, some of the early kinds
being ripe as early as the first week in September.

The excessive heat of July, in which month occurred the greatest number
of days on record with a maximum temperature of 90 degrees or above, was
probably the chief cause of somewhat smaller results from our cross
pollination work. There is evidence, indeed, that for effective
fertilization, considerable heat is needed, but not the extreme
temperatures that occurred during this period.

In spite of the