Florida and Calii-ornia Lahoratorius 253 



of the germ within clifTerent parts of the plant. He obtained 

 what he thoui^ht were infections, but the "' work of the first few 

 montlis was thrown away, principally because," he later said,** 

 "I did not know how to proceed, my technique beint; defective. 

 Up to November 24, 1893, I had isolated five or six organisms 

 . . . but had not obtained infections with any, and was very much 

 at sea after a great deal of hard work." On September 23, and 

 perhaps before, he had begun to keep carefully prepared memo- 

 randa of every investigational procedure. These show that he was 

 determined to study the disease, if at all, in accordance with the 

 canons of Koch. ' 



In December, at the regular meeting of the Biological Society of 

 Washington in Assembly Hall of the Cosmos Club, he presented 

 a thirty-minute paper " On a Bacterial Disease of Cucumbers, etc., 

 working through the Fibrovascular Bundles; Probably Transmitted 

 by Insects," Immediately F. M. Webster, entomologist of the Ohio 

 Agricultural Experiment Station, inquired whether he planned to 

 publish it since he planned to begin work the next spring on the 

 entomological aspect of the problem. Two years before, Waite 

 had presented " good evidence " ■'*' of the insect-transmission of 

 pear blight. The completed demonstration that pear blight bac- 

 teria are carried from flower to flower by insects, furthermore, 

 nearly coincided in point of time with the confirmatory experi- 

 ments which established that southern or Texas cattle fever is 

 transmitted by a cattle tick {Ixodes bovis Ry.). Smith admitted 

 that these discoveries and their proof led him to search for proof 

 of his hypothesis that the plant bacterial disease he was studying 

 is insect-transmitted. We shall meet this point again later in this 

 book. 



On January 6, 1894, before the Botanical Seminar, he presented 

 a " Synopsis of [J. R.] Green's paper on Vegetable Ferments," 

 published in the March, 1893, issue of Aruials of Botany and a 

 review of which article, also prepared by Smith, was to appear 

 in Science'^' on March 2, 1894. With much reason it may be 

 questioned whether, in fact. Smith during these years could be 

 regarded as a deep student of vegetable ferments. That he was 



*'■ Bacteria in relation to plant diseases op. cit., 2: 217. 



*" E. F. Smith, Intro, to bacterial diseases of plants, op. cit., 25, 30, and authority 

 cited. 



*' 23(578): U6-U7, March 2, 1894. 



