266 HARRY MARSHALL WARD 



another candidate, whom, however, the University refused to 

 accept. A deadlock ensued, which was only solved by the 

 Government finally refusing to appoint either candidate. This 

 was a great disappointment to Ward, which was in some degree 

 mitigated by his appointment to the new Chair of Botany in the 

 Forestry Branch of the Royal Indian Engineering College, 

 Cooper's Hill. The utilitarian atmosphere in which he found 

 himself was not very congenial to him. But he had at any rate 

 at last some sort of adequate position and a laboratory to work 

 in, and here he remained not, I think, unhappily for ten 

 years. He was, as he had been at Manchester, a successful 

 teacher, and had the gift of interesting his pupils, whom he used 

 to bring weekly to Kew during the summer months to visit the 

 Arboretum. In point of research, this was the period of much 

 of his most brilliant work. 



The study of Uredineae occupied Ward at intervals during 

 his life. The reproductive organs are pleomorphic, and it is no 

 easy task to ascertain with certainty those that belong to the 

 same life-history. In a paper on Entyloma Ranunculi, published 

 in the Phil. Trans, in 1887, Ward for the first time traced the 

 germination of the conidia of an Entyloma, and confirmed 

 Winter's suggestion that they were not an independent organism, 

 but actually belonged to it. Incidentally he discussed the con- 

 ditions which are favourable to the invasion of a host by a 

 parasitic fungus. This raised the question of immunity, to which 

 at intervals he repeatedly returned. 



About the same time he published in the Quarterly Journal 

 of Microscopical Science the results of an investigation under- 

 taken for the Science and Art Department on the mode of 

 infection of the potato plant by Phytophthora infestans, which 

 produces the potato disease. It was not easy to add anything 

 to the classical work of de Bary, but it was ascertained that 

 ' the development of the zoospores is delayed or even arrested 

 by direct daylight," and Ward's attention was attracted to the 

 problem, which he afterwards solved, of how the hyphae erode 

 the cell-wall. 



The solution was given in 1888 in a paper in the Annals of 

 Botany, " On a Lily Disease," which has now become classical. 



