110 Early Work in North America 



A particle of this viscous fluid introduced upon the point of a knife into 

 the bark of a healthy tree is in many cases followed by blight of the part, 

 but with me not in every instance. The result if such it be, is not so 

 uniform as the infection of warm milk; for this, however, there are very 

 possibly other explanations. It is not improbable that certain trees in 

 certain conditions are able to withstand the destroying influences of lowly 

 organized plant enemies. Plants and parasites are forms of vegetable life ; 

 in the struggle for existence one or the other is subdued and the van- 

 quished perishes. If we look once more to the affected branch we find the 

 disease spreads more or less rapidly from the point of origin, and upon 

 examination the moving, microscopic things are discovered in advance of 

 the discolored portions of the tissues, but not very far ahead — an inch per- 

 haps. Does it not seem plausible that they cause the subsequently apparent 

 change ? It does to me, but this is the extent of my faith ; we should not 

 say the conclusion is reached and the cause of the difficulty definitely 

 ascertained. So far as I know the idea is an entirely new one — that 

 bacteria cause disease in plants — though abundantly proved in the case of 

 animals. . . . The so-called germ-theory of disease in animals, especially 

 in infectious and contagious diseases, is rapidly gaining support and 

 credence. It is not impossible that we are now making a beginning of 

 the application of the theory to the diseases of plants which have hereto- 

 fore been mysterious and inscrutable. 



In August 1880 Burrill went before Section B, the Natural 

 History division, of the American Association for the Advance- 

 ment of Science with a paper on " Anthrax of Fruit Trees: or the 

 so-called Fire Blight of Pear and Twig Blight of Apple Trees." " 

 In his second paper before the state society he had " clearly identi- 

 fied as bacteria [the] minute, moving things . , . detected in every 

 examination made";'*' and he now offered an explicit statement 

 on the morphology and pathogenic nature of the bacterial organ- 

 ism. The organism, he later wrote," " was compared with Bacillus 

 amylobacter ... of Van Tieghem, but was not otherwise named. 

 The name Micrococcus amylovorus first appeared in print in the 

 Eleventh Report of the Board of Trustees of the Illinois Industrial 

 University for 1882 in connection with a short but, as it has 

 proved, suflficient description." 



" Proc. Amer. Assoc. Adv. Sci. for 1880. Salem, Mass., 29: 583-597, 1881. Smith 

 listed Burrill's papers on Bacillus amylovorus in the Centralblatt f. Bakt. II, 5(8): 

 276, 1899. See also Neiv York (Cornell) Agric. Exp't Sta. Bull. 329: 369, 1913. 



'" T. J. Burrill, Bacteria as a cause of disease in plants, American Naturalist 15: 

 527-531, 1881. 



''' Phytopathology 4 (1): 31, 1914. 



