PROBLEMS IN PREVENTING PLANT-DISEASE EPIDEMICS 63 



in the Bible that one or more of them plagued the farmers of the Holy 

 Land, as there are warnings in Deuteronomy and other books that the Lord 

 would curse the land with blasting and with mildew if His commandments 

 were not obeyed. In I Kings, Chapter 8, famine and pestilence, blasting and 

 mildew, locust and caterpillar are mentioned in the same verse with "... if 

 their enemy besiege them in the land of their cities." Plant diseases and 

 insect pests evidently were included among the major menaces to national 

 welfare. The ancient Hebrews obviously feared plant diseases but did not 

 understand them and therefore attributed their occurrence to the wrath of 

 God because of the transgressions of the people. In Amos, Chapter 4, it ap- 

 pears that punishment actually was inflicted, for it is said "I have smitten 

 you with blasting and mildew ... yet have ye not returned unto me saith 

 the Lord." 



That rusts of wheat and barley were major factors in the production of 

 these crops in ancient Greece and Rome is clear from the writings of Theo- 

 phrastus, the "Father of Botany," in the Fourth Century B.C. and those of 

 Pliny, the great Roman compiler of natural history, in the First Century 

 A.D., who called the rust of wheat and barley the greatest pest of crops. Like 

 the Hebrews, the Greeks and Romans attributed epidemics to supernatural 

 causes and besought various of their gods to protect the crops against them. 

 "Stern Robigo, spare the herbage of the cereals; withhold, we pray, thy 

 roughening hand . . ." was the opening of a prayer to the Roman rust god, 

 Robigo, or Robigus, who reputedly came into existence about 700 b.c. and 

 whom the Romans tried to placate in the annual festival of the Robigalia 

 from that time until well into the Christian era. The Greeks and Romans 

 mixed their superstition with naturalism, as they attributed rust epidemics 

 to multiple causes: the gods, the position of the moon and stars, and to cer- 

 tain kinds of weather. They observed differences in varietal susceptibility 

 and in the effect of location on rust, correctly stating that rust was likely to 

 be most abundant in low-lying fields. 



In King Lear, 1605, Shakespeare says that ". . . the foul fiend Flibber- 

 tigibbet . . . mildews the white wheat. . . ." From this time onward sev- 

 eral writers on agricultural subjects in England complained that no reme- 

 dies were known for the destructive rusts and smuts of wheat, and Parlia- 

 ment asked for a report on the situation. 



There was much speculation about plant diseases, but Rouen, France, 

 took action by passing a law, ca. 1660, requiring the destruction of barberry 

 bushes because of the observed fact that rust was most severe near them. 

 This was two hundred years before it was known how barberry affected the 

 development of rust on wheat. Indeed, it was long before it was even known 

 that stem rust was caused by a microscopic fungus. The legislators of Rouen 

 deserve much credit for realizing that there was a dangerous alliance be- 

 tween barberry and stem rust and for trying to break it, even though they 



