144 Pathologist U. S. Department of Agriculture 



cultivation to particular altitudes and districts. But the remedies 

 were tardy and the losses enormous. 



Ward's abilities as a pure and practical scientist were recog- 

 nized. In 18S9-1890 appeared the first edition of his text Diseases 

 of Plants. Dean Emeritus E. M. Freeman of the College of Agri- 

 culture of the University of Minnesota, one of Ward's students at 

 Cambridge and for several years with the United States Depart- 

 ment of Agriculture in cereals investigation, has written of his 

 work: *^ 



From 1881, the time of his return from Ceylon, to 1888, Ward's con- 

 tributions dealt with a large range of mycological subjects, including 

 important results on the tubercle organisms of leguminous plants . . . 

 In 1888 he published his paper On a Lily Disease ■*- in which he seems 

 to have become fairly launched in what was probably the main problem 

 of his life work, the problem of parasitism. His attention was naturally 

 attracted to any association of plants in intimate relations of nutrition, and 

 his paper on the Ginger Beer Plant opened the way to new conceptions 

 of fungous nutrition. 



Between 1886 and 1888, at the seventh, eighth, and ninth 

 meetings of the Society for the Promotion of Agricultural Science, 

 three papers were read in which directly or indirectly the root 

 nodules of leguminous plants and the atmospheric fixation of 

 nitrogen by certain bacteria were discussed. In 1886 Dr. R. C. 

 Kedzie in his address " Humus as a Source of Nitrogen for 

 Plants"*^ excluded considering "the recent announcement" by 

 Wilbur Olin Atwater of the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment 

 Station that " under certain circumstances the free nitrogen of the 

 air is assimilable by plants." But, from the standpoint of agri- 

 cultural chemistry, he discussed other phases of his subject, and in 

 1887 Dr. B. D. Halsted, in his paper "A Hint as to Nitrogen 

 Appropriation in Clovers,"** alluded to Kedzie's summary of his 

 experiments on the '" different capacities of cereal and leguminous 



*"■ Phytopathology 3 (l): 2, 1913. 



*" See Envin Smith's review, A lily disease, Jour. Alyc. 5 (1): 46-48, 1889. 

 Ward's paper appeared in the Annals of Botany 2 (7): 319-382. Smith later (Plant 

 pathology: a retrospect and prospect, op. cit., 607) called this "a remarkably fine 

 paper," ranking in importance with papers by DeBary, Woronin, Farlow, etc. on 

 the etiology of various plant diseases. The biology of the form-genus considered 

 was " a Botrytis of the Polyactis type." 



^'^ Proc. 7th Ann. Meet. Soc. Prom. Agric. Sci. 37-41, 1886. 



*' Proc. 8th Ann. Meet. Soc. Prom. Agric. Sci. 41-44, 1887. 



