On Plant Pathology and Bacthriology 91 



1S6^ William Henry Brewer had accepted a professorship in agri- 

 culture. He was a botanist, an authority on farm animals and 

 animal breeding. But he was not a student of plant diseases. Nor 

 was Johnson who was the author of the two small but important 

 books. How crops fee J, a treatise on the atmosphere and soil as 

 related to the nutrition of agricultural plants, and How crops 

 grow, a treatise on chemical composition, structure, and life of the 

 plant for all students of agriculture. Nor did the creation in 1873 

 of an agricultural experiment station in Connecticut, first at Mid- 

 dletown and two years later on a land-grant basis at New Haven, 

 bring about immediately in that state a definite program of re- 

 search in diseases of plants. 



At the United States Department of Agriculture, William 

 Saunders, superintendent of gardens and grounds, had written as 

 early as 1876'' on Phylloxera vastatrix, the "grape-root louse." 

 In the Department reports appeared numerous miscellaneous men- 

 tions of crop diseases prevalent or threatening in this country. But 

 there was no well defined research program for their study. In 

 January 1869, at an agricultural conference in Illinois, T. J. Burrill 

 had constructively suggested that a "new field of labor" was 

 "opening before the student of botany, that of the vegetable dis- 

 eases. Perhaps," he said, "nothing pertaining to plants is so little 

 understood"; and he prophesied that with "the increased facili- 

 ties of later years for microscopic observations " more attention 

 would be given to the subject. His work, and that of a few other 

 men, gave the work, as we shall see, its start in America. 



William Gilson Farlow^ '" in 1866 had received his bachelor of 

 arts degree from Harvard College and in 1870 a degree of doctor 

 of medicine from the university medical school. Before entering 

 the medical school, he had studied anatomy under Dr. Jeffries 

 Wyman; and before graduating he had been honored by an ap- 

 pointment as a surgical interne at the Massachusetts General 

 Hospital under Dr. H. J. Bigelow^ He had chosen to study medi- 

 cine because, as he later told Smith, Dr. Gray had advised him to 

 do so, 



* Kept, of the Comm. of Agric, 70-73. Washington, Govt. Print. Office, 1877. 



"William Albert Setcliell, William Gilson Farlow 1844-1919, Nat'l Acad, of 

 Sciences, Biographical Memoirs 21 (4), 22 pp. See also, Anniversary Number 

 Commemorating the 100th Birthday of William Gilson Farlow 1844-1944, Farlowia, 

 A Journal of Cryptogamic Botany 2 (1): iff., Jan. 1945. 



