Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/25

Rh specific interrelation and identity of the two types. I make this announcement with all the more pleasure, that for three years past, both on vines growing out-doors and in pots in-doors, I had in vain attempted to obtain the same result.

—The result which follows the puncture of the root-louse is an abnormal swelling, differing in form according to the particular part and texture of the root. These swellings, which are generally commenced at the tips of the rootlets, where there is excess of plasmatic and albuminous matter, eventually rot, and the lice forsake them and betake themselves to fresh ones—the living tissue being necessary to the existence of this as of all plant-lice. The decay affects the parts adjacent to the swellings, and on the more fibrous roots cuts off the supply of sap to all parts beyond. As these last decompose, the lice congregate on the larger ones, until at last the root-system literally wastes away.

During the first year of attack there are scarcely any outward manifestations of disease, though the fibrous roots, if examined, will be found covered with nodosities, particularly in the latter part of the growing season. The disease is then in its incipient stage. The second year all these fibrous roots vanish, and the lice not only prevent the formation of new ones, but, as just stated, settle on the larger roots, which they injure by causing hypertrophy of the parts punctured, which also eventually become disorganized and rot. At this stage the outward symptoms of the disease first become manifest, in a sickly, yellowish appearance of the leaf and a reduced growth of cane. As the roots continue to decay, these symptoms become more acute, until by about the third year the vine dies. Such is the course of the malady on vines of the species vinifera when circumstances are favorable to the increase of the pest. When the vine is about dying it is generally impossible to discover the cause of the death, the lice, which had been so numerous the first and second years of invasion, having left for fresh pasturage.

.—The gall-lice can only spread by traveling, when newly hatched, from one vine to another; and, if this slow mode of progression were the only one which the species is capable of, the disease would be comparatively harmless. The root-lice, however, not only travel underground along the interlocking roots of adjacent vines, but crawl actively over the surface of the ground, or wing their way from vine to vine, and from vineyard to vineyard. Doubts have repeatedly been expressed by European writers as to the power