66 Background of Work and Study in Public Health 



among the Uredinales,"^ he made use of careful culture experi- 

 ments to determine life histories and cycles of development of 

 fungi. "'^ Michael Stepanovitch Woronin and Anders Sand0e 

 Oersted soon made use of the procedures, new then to botanical 

 investigations; and eventually, we shall see in Chapter III, the 

 new methods would be brought to America by one of DeBary's 

 students. Although DeBary died at the age of iifty-seven years, 

 no less than sixty-eight men later distinguished in science studied 

 under him at Strassburg."' 



On one occasion at least, Erwin Smith divided the history of 

 plant pathology into two periods — before and after the year 

 1880."^ Others"^ who have written on this subject seem fairly in 

 accord that a pre-modern era ended during the early 1880's, about 

 the time that DeBary, after supplying a scientific interpretation of 

 the cereal rusts, was completing and ready to publish his classical 

 v/ork on the comparative morphology and biology of the fungi 

 and other forms of the lower plant orders. 



Smith chose as his year of division, 1880, for many reasons. In 

 his presidential address before the Society for Plant Morphology 

 and Physiology in 1902 he emphasized that before that year 

 laboratory methods for the study of fungi and bacteria 



were not well developed. In the first place, there was no exact and con- 

 venient method for obtaining pure cultures and, in the second place, the 

 microscope was still the principal instrument of research. . . . The main 

 thing considered was the parasite rather than the host plant, and the 

 technique for the study of both was of the simplest sort. We had no 

 precise fixing and staining methods, no fine microtomes with their yards 

 of serial sections, no synthetic culture media, no elaborate sterilizing ovens 

 and broad chambers, and no apochromatic glass for lenses. " Pure cul- 

 tures " were practically unknown, and photography and photomicrography 

 had not yet become arts of daily use in the laboratory. . . . Only the 

 crude beginnings of bacteriology were earlier than 1880. Prior to that 

 time we had, it is true, the fractional and dilution methods of isolation, 



^*° Joseph Charles Arthur, History and scope of plant pathology, address before 

 the Congress of Arts and Science, Universal Exposition, St. Louis, 1904, ed. by 

 H. J. Rogers, 5: 154, Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1906. 



^*'' W. A. Kellerman, Index to Uredineous culture experiments with list of species 

 and hosts for North America, Jour. Mycology 9 (4): 244, Dec. 1903. 



"■^ E. F. Smith, Anton de Bary, op. cit., 2. 



^** Plant pathology: a retrospect and prospect, Science n. s. 15 (381): 601-612, 

 at pp. 602-605, 1902. 



^*® J. C. Arthur, op. cit., where a period 1850-1880 was considered. 



