I was walking through a market in Hong Kong in 1902 and I saw a few bushels of nuts that I had never heard of or seen before. The nuts looked like acorns but when I picked them up I found them as hard as hickory nuts. I cracked one of them with a brick and it was almost as hard to crack as a hickory nut. It was unmistakably an acorn, I thought, and I bought a bushel of the nuts and sent them to this country. It is called Pisania by botanists and it has many of the characteristics of an acorn. The kernel of this nut comes out whole and for that reason it would be very easily cracked by mechanical means. It has a sweetness which does not suggest an acorn. It does not remind you of the acorn. It is a commercial product in Southern China shipped down the West river and it seemed to me well worth while trying to grow it in the United States. We have had a great deal of trouble with it. We did not find the right place for it at first. It was hardy here in Washington, even, for a few seasons but the temperature at seventeen, eighteen and twenty below zero finally killed it out. It is now growing down in Mississippi.
Here is a photograph sent me from Honkong, the only one I have of the tree as it appears on the hills of Honkong. This tree which is now 11 feet tall on the place of Mr. Joe Williams at Langdon, Mississippi, is one of the few that is now growing in the United States. There is one in Southern California. It probably would be perfectly hardy along the Gulf coast. Just how good a bearer it is going to prove I do not know but it is very interesting even to register the fact that the plant is established in the Southern States.
The _Macadamia ternifolia_, or Queensland nut, is not quite so well known in Queensland as I thought it was. A very brilliant young man from Australia, by the name of Johnston, passed through my office the other day and I showed him the photograph of the Macadamia and to my chagrin he did not know much about it, although he was a very good botanist and a very keen man. He said "We do not pay much attention to these things over there." That is really characteristic of many of the foreign plants that we have brought in. They are not developed in their own countries any more than some of the fruits which we have in this country are not developed by us. Mr. Littlepage and I are going out in a day or two to see if we can find some larger papaws. Now the papaw has been just as badly neglected by the Americans as the Macadamia by the Australians and it may be that the only way to get the papaw developed is to send it to some other country and get them to develop it. We do not always develop our own possibilities.