Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/411

Rh considerable accuracy of manipulation was thoroughly effective. This method, if no easier were to be had, was well worth to practical agriculture all that the experiment stations of the world have ever cost. Within only a few years, however, the Jensen treatment was supplanted by the formalin treatment; a treatment so simple, inexpensive and effective that, save for minor improvements of detail, the end seems to have been reached in the search for preventives for the particular diseases to which the method applies.

Growth of knowledge concerning bacterial diseases has occurred, beginning with the pear blight which baffled all horticulture prior to the assertion of its bacterial nature by Professor Burrill. The proof that bacteria can and do cause plant diseases has been definitely adduced, and a large number of such diseases have been recognized upon many plants. Not only from the scientific side have these ailments been studied, but from the practical as well, and preventive and palliative measures have in many instances been found.

The soil is often spoken of as the living earth. Not only may it live, but it also partakes of those chief accompaniments of life, viz., health, sickness and death. A healthy soil may, from an agricultural point of view, be regarded as one capable of fulfilling all its vital functions; a sick soil, one in which some such functions are impaired. Of only one class of soil sickness may I speak, namely, that which results in producing sick plants by harboring pathogenic germs. The cotton wilt, the Texas root rot, the watermelon, tobacco, tomato and cabbage wilts, the cabbage club foot and the onion smut are conspicuous examples of disease so propagated. Diseases of this type not only destroy the crop, but they preclude the possibility of successful culture of the plant in question, or of its close botanical relatives for many years. Such foes to agriculture have completely destroyed the possibility of tobacco growing on many farms otherwise eminently adapted to this crop and ill adapted to any other, resulting in great depreciation in the value of the land. This encroachment upon valuable soil will proceed yearly, and with geometrically increasing rapidity, until means of prevention are discovered, as they have now been in some instances, and the method of prevention becomes common knowledge. Soil diseases, the most dreaded of all dangers to the plant, are prevalent to much greater extent in the south than in the north. One field is known to exist in South Carolina upon which neither melons, cotton nor cow-peas can be grown. It is conceivable that many other germs could infest one and the same field, but no greater affliction concerning such staple crops seems possible.

Growth in popular appreciation of the importance of plant diseases and of the value of remedial and prophylactic measures is perhaps the most striking characteristic of plant pathology in the last twenty years.