Horsfall • The Fight with the Fungi 



125 



James G. Horsfall 



The Fight with the Fungi 



Reprinted with the permission of the author 

 and the pubhsher from American Journal of 

 Botany 43:532-536, 1956. 



The title of this paper sounds as if 

 the roof were about to fall in on us— 

 that we have lost or are about to lose 

 the fight with the fungi. Say not so! 

 We have only begun to fight, but fight 

 we must. 



We may easily forget that fungi 

 feed at the same table with us. This is 

 so because they have a ticket to the 

 first sitting. They consume our food 

 in the farmer's field, on the trains and 

 trucks that bring it to us, and in the 

 grocer's store. If this fight go not for- 

 ward to success, we may one day not be 

 able to smile at the "naivete" of Mr. 

 Malthus who thought that we would 

 soon eat ourselves out of our own 

 food supply. 



Fungi have been on this planet 

 longer than we. They have developed 

 some fantastically efficient devices that 

 serve them in their fight vAth. us. They 

 are well able to search out our food 

 plants so that they also may eat, drink 

 and be merry. 



It has been fun to help a little in 

 the research to develop the counter- 

 measures that we use in our fight with 

 them. Before we come to the counter- 

 measures, however, I should like to dis- 



cuss some of the famous plant diseases 

 of antiquity and how some of them 

 have altered the course of history. 



Three plant diseases of modern 

 times are known to almost everyone. 

 Perhaps the best known is the chestnut 

 blight that swept every chestnut tree 

 from the hills from Maine to Georgia. 

 The second is the Dutch elm disease 

 that is marching down the streets of 

 cities and killing the elms from Mont- 

 real to Denver. And the third is oak 

 wilt. It is scaring the wits out of the 

 people who produce the oak flooring 

 for our houses and kegs for our beer. 

 These diseases latch onto our con- 

 sciousness because they are new and 

 they strike down handsome big trees. 

 These are some of the blasts and 

 blights that beset us, but what really 

 robs us are such diseases as wheat rust 

 and potato rot. 



Wheat rust is perhaps the most 

 famous disease of antiquity and it is 

 still with us. Wheat rust robs us of our 

 bread, the very staff of life. Those of us 

 who went through both World Wars 

 remember the "wheatless days" of 

 World War I. We had wheatless days 

 in that war because 1917 was one of 



