Page:Treatise on Cultivation of the Potato.djvu/56

 like turnips, only very thin, and thinned out the plants to a foot or so apart. In the whole there were not twelve diseased plants, although they grew in a garden, closely adjoining Black-hearts, which are attacked by the disease earlier than perhaps any other variety. I am, very truly yours,

THOMAS GREGG."

", 1st January, 1870. —Miss Walker of Crebilly received a package of your potato seed from me on the 5th April. Some days after, she sowed it on a kind of hot-bed, and it came forward soon. She had it then transplanted to drills in a kind of boggy ground, proverbial for disease. The leaves of her seedlings were diseased, but the potatoes which were of various kind?, all resisted it; as did the haulms, and they were near diseased kinds without ditch or wall between them; and she states she had an average crop; tubers weighing 2, 3, 4, 5 ounces.

JOHN SLOAN."

[This is the ex-Head Constable, R.I.C., writer of second report].

" — I have saved some of the best of those that entirely resisted the disease, and I trust the effort you are making, will be successful. If you cannot, by your plan, entirely eradicate the disease, you will, I have no doubt, raise some new and valuable varieties. My plants were sown in April, about two yards from diseased potatoes, on sandy loam, pretty well ventilated, and yard manure used. They were drilled on ridge, and thinned out. About 40 plants out of 100 absolutely resisted the disease. Of the infected plants, at some roots nearly all, at others half, and at a great many only a few—say one or two tubers at a root, were affected. I think the disease might be extinguished by your method, and I think it ought to be tried. I think the Government, or some of our great societies, ought to take up the matter. Wishing you Qwevy success. I am, yours respectfully,

W. SMITH."

December 25th, 1875. — The plants grew very well until long after the potatoes in the neighbourhood were diseased, and then the foliage of the