PRESIDENT REED: I would like to ask Dr. Morris about that myself. I am very much interested in the line of grafting, as we graft 50,000 to 100,000 every spring, using this same method. I feel as Mr. Jones does, that the losses from grafting are largely due to heat and the fermentation of sap. We find perhaps, that the first week of grafting in cherry, we can almost invariably secure a fairly good stand. Following that it tapers as the warmth and air increase, although the scions are kept in cold storage, perfectly dormant, the sap is coming up, and the increased rays of the sun--we get a very small percentage, and it seems to become less every day, and we have always used the dark wax. While I have been using paraffin wax a good deal of the time, I put lampblack in it for coloring.
DR. MORRIS: I have until this year. In order to get Mr. Jones' points, I tried to work out the philosophy of the subject and see what values there are, what meanings in the methods which led to his success. Then following that line of investigation, I stopped into another line of observation, and arrived at the transparent paraffin method, so that this is the first year in which I have tried it, but the results are perfectly remarkable. I have only done it for a year, but you will see 100% of catches on almost everything, hickories, walnuts, hazels. I must tell you of one very remarkable incident. Mrs. Morris had some dwarf trees set out on the slope of the lawn, dwarf pear trees. One of my men cut one of them off with a lawn mower the latter part of August. The top kicked around under foot for three or four days, wilted in the sun. We were walking past it along in August. I think Mr. Bixby said, "Why don't you try grafting on that kind of material?" I said, "I will, blessed if I don't." So I cut three pear scions from this wilted top that had been cut by the lawnmower in August, and I put them on a scrub pear tree under the fence near the house. And I tried this paraffin method, and in about six days one of them started out a shoot, and I said to one of my men, "We will transplant this. This is no place for it." I meant in the spring, or in a year or so. He transplanted it the next day. And it grew I think about half an inch after that, made good wood to last through the winter. So I don't know what the limitations of this paraffin method are. But that is a thing I would hardly dare tell about unless there were men here in this room who had seen it. That little pear top, cut off by mistake, kicked about under foot a few days in August, no sort of scion that any one would ever think of using as a graft, put it in as a joke, and with the further abuse of being transplanted; but it started growth, and now it is going to be a good pear tree.