Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/412

406 At the beginning of this period spraying was in no wise general. It was of rare occurrence. Man suffered unresistingly the attacks of the molds, mildews, rots and blights. The circulation of thousands of state experiment station bulletins and similar bulletins from the national department of agriculture, the vigorous campaign of farmers' institutes, farmers' reading circles, farmers' extension courses, and the extended use of farmers' periodicals and agricultural papers have served to bring the latest discoveries of science to the use of him who will heed. As is to be expected, it is the man who most closely studies his business, he who has most at stake, the large specialist in the culture of any crop, who first embraces the offered aid. The large orchardist or vineyardist leads the way in the adoption of new methods and new machinery. The revolution looking toward recognition of the value of plant treatment is now so thoroughly inaugurated that the treatment of such diseases, both insect and fungous, in the case of fruit and trucking crops is of general occurrence. The movement, too, is world-wide.

The practical outcome of all the investigation and propaganda up to the present time is that many hundreds of plant diseases have been recognized; for a hundred or more have been prescribed remedial or preventive measures, many of which are eminently successful; witness, the treatment of cereal smuts, the peach curl, the grape black rot, the powdery mildews. The saving occasioned by any one of these, as is true of scores of others, would amply suffice to pay all the expense of investigation and propaganda incurred in the development of the whole field of plant pathology. By oat smut alone the estimated damage in the United States yearly is $26,766,166, a loss avoidable by an annual expenditure of less than four cents an acre. The saving actually made in Dakota, Minnesota and Wisconsin in one year is placed at $5,000,000.

The future problems of plant pathology are manifold. The period of growth must continue long before the work now undertaken is done. Many diseases of even the cultivated plants are not yet recognized. The diseases of wild plants, particularly the weeds, must too be studied to ascertain the possibility of intercommunication of diseases between weeds and crop plants. The life histories of all disease producing fungi must be closely studied, particularly to determine their hibernating condition. As yet the merest beginning has been made. The interrelation of host and parasite must be studied, the periods, points and modes of infection made known. The biology of the fungi, their life habits, conditions of spore formation, characters of growth, relation to light, heat, moisture, nutriment, etc.; their resistance to adverse conditions, their longevity under various conditions of environment are all problems of ultimate practicality. The question of species is unsettled and the