I will give five dollars every year to any boy scout who wins any of our prizes. That is a permanent offer. Or I will enlarge it perhaps, after we discuss the matter further by including the Camp Fire Girls. I will add others to that list. I will give five dollars to any member of one of those organizations affiliated with us who wins any nut prize in any year, in addition to our regular prizes. Furthermore we will offer to name any prize nut after the discoverer, so that his or her name will go down in history, perhaps causing much fame.
DR. BIGELOW: I have had my attention called to the fact that in the West the beech trees are heavily laden with nuts. It suddenly dawned on me that in all of my boyhood experience as a hunter and tramper, I had never seen one edible beech nut in Connecticut. I know there are many beech trees around Stamford, but I have not been able to find any nuts. I have advertised for them but although I have received more than a hundred packages from over the rest of the country, I have not seen one single beech nut from Connecticut. Some of the old-timers say they were once plentiful. I wonder whether beech nuts have disappeared from Connecticut as have potato balls.
DR. MORRIS: In the lime stone regions they commonly fill well. I have a great many beech trees on my place from one year to more than one hundred years of age, and they came from natural seeding, but the seeds in this part of Connecticut are very small and shrivelled. They are not valuable like the ones in western New York, for instance, and I do not remember even as a boy to have known of eastern beech trees with well-filled nuts. Many of these inferior nuts will sprout, however.
MR. LITTLEPAGE: I think Dr. Bigelow has hit upon a point of a great deal of interest. For example, on my farm in Maryland I think there are perhaps three or four hundred beech trees of various sizes, probably none of them under ten years of age and up to fifty, and in the four years that I have been observing these beech trees, there has never grown upon them a single full, fertile beech nut. I have observed very carefully. On my farm in Indiana I have been observing the same thing for probably ten or twelve years, and I have never seen a single filled beech nut. There are some beech trees there two feet in diameter.