104 Early Work in North America 



a new department of botany in Washington University and to 

 direct the Shaw School of Botany in St. Louis. He accepted and, 

 when in 1889 the Missouri Botanical Garden was established, he 

 became its director also. 



Strawberry diseases were being studied elsewhere in the central 

 west. Before the Mississippi Valley Horticultural Society meeting 

 at New Orleans on January 16, 1885, Franklin Sumner Earle read 

 a paper on the white rust and other diseases of strawberry. He 

 had been born at Dwight, Illinois, in 1856, and in 1886 he began 

 special work in mycology at the state university. Collaborating 

 with BurriU, he became a joint author of a report on The Ery- 

 siphaceae of Illinois. 



Burrill's discovery of the bacterial origin of a plant disease 

 (1877-1882) plus Farlow's application of foreign culture methods 

 to the study of fungi (1875-1880) had encouraged the few Ameri- 

 can vegetable pathologists to believe that a new science of plant 

 pathology, embracing both pure and applied phases, was immi- 

 nent. American medical pathologists for some years had been 

 acquainted with the work of the great living physiologists of 

 Europe, Carl F. W. Ludwig and Claude Bernard.'^ In 1879 had 

 appeared in Paris Bernard's Legons sur les phenomenes de la vie 

 commune aux animaux et aux vegetaux^^~ which, as the title im- 

 plied, treated of the phenomena common to plants and animals, 

 and by the middle 1880's had greatly augmented interest in the 

 study of physiology, including plant physiology. Among the 

 plants which Pasteur studied experimentally at one time or 

 another were grape-berries. From a plant's sound interior, he had 

 extracted the juice, and, making sure that no surface bacteria 

 became commingled, proved the juice free from micro-organisms. 

 Flasks treated to washings from the grape-surface developed 

 "growths of some sort." In 1879-1880 Chamberland, working in 

 Pasteur's laboratory, demonstrated that beans taken directly from 



^^ William Henry Welch etc., op. cit., 85. Concerning Bernard as France's 

 '■ greatest physiologist " and " founder of experimental medicine, i. e., the artificial 

 production of disease by means of chemical and physical manipulation," see F. H. 

 Garrison, Introd. to the Hist, of Med., op. cit., 544-545. 



^'^ Annotated list of persons, Pasteur, The Hist, of a A\ind, op. cit., 325 (Lud- 

 wig), p. 339; Intro, to Hist, of Med., op. cit., 555-558. F. R. Lillie in Woods Hole 

 Marine Biol. Lab., op. cit., 139, characterizes Bernard's book as a culmmation of 

 knowledge in " general and comparative physiology." See also, J. M. D. Olmsted, 

 Claude Bernard, 55 ff, 122 ff, N. Y., Harper, 1938. 



