Winter Meeting. 355 



and more mischief as our conditions become more artificial, our pro- 

 cesses and labors more specialized. There is not a crop grown but that 

 pays duty to them, and sometimes the duty is larger than the proceeds. 

 The cereals are destroyed by rusts and smuts ; potatoes suffer from the 

 earlier and later blight of the foliage and from scab and rot of the 

 tubers ; cabbage fails from club-root and from black-rot ; melon vines 

 are destroyed by anthracnose and mildews, cucumbers from wilt ; straw- 

 berry plants are devitalized by leaf-rust, and the fruit perishes from soft 

 rots ; raspberry and blackberry bushes suffer from anthracnose and 

 orange rust ; grape foliage is mildewed, and black rot and other pests 

 take the otherwise luscious berries ; pear trees suffer miserably from 

 blight, and the same disease affects the apple tree ; peach trees go to the 

 bad with curled-leaf and the still mysterious yellows, v/hile the fruit is 

 scabbed or destroyed with rot ; and the apple struggles not too success- 

 fully against a series of pestiferous agents of disease and destruction. 

 What a list of depredations and discouragements ! Yet these are only 

 examples. Who shall tell tlic whole story? 



It is impossible to give anything like correct figures for the losses 

 incurred. At best, the estimates are wild ones, whoever makes them, but 

 they can be closely ascertained in special cases, and these form some 

 basis for further deductions. Conservatively stated, it may be said 

 that the average annual crop ravages by these little-known depredators 

 are not less in Illinois than $20,000,000 to $30,000,000, and probably 

 no less in Missouri and Kansas in proportion to the crop values. For 

 the whole country we shall not make too high an estimate when from 

 $100,000,000 to $200,000,000 is named as the annual loss. How easy it 

 would be to pay the indebtedness from wars and cost of the Panama 

 Canal at the same time if we, in our boasted lordship, could entirely 

 vanquish these minute but audacious and persistently active foes of our 

 fields and plantations ! 



Through several centuries grape vines in the Old World were 

 dusted with sulphur to keep down the mildew, and for perhaps as long 

 .a time seed wheat has in certain districts been treated with blue stone to 

 prevent stinking smut or bunt in the crop. The operations were not 

 founded upon rational knowledge, and were not begun from the teach- 

 ings of science, but, like many of the physicians' methods, were im- 

 ])irical practices. Within our own generation, however, studies have 

 been directed to these hitherto unrecognized or neglected vegetable 

 parasites, and methods have been devised to combat at least some of 

 their ravages. The microscope has revealed the structure, nature and 

 growth-processes of the little plants. It has been settled that they are 



