Chapter IV 



VEGETABLE PATHOLOGIST WITH THE UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT 



OF AGRICULTURE. FUNGOUS DISEASES OF PLANTS, 



AND PEACH YELLOWS, HIS SPECIALTIES. 



WITH THE YEAR 1887 was begun another decade of 

 sustained progress in the history of American plant pa- 

 thology — a period which Smith later described as one of " read- 

 justment and of taking stock of the new discoveries . . . also 

 of great research activity and there were distinct advances," he 

 said, " in several directions." ^ 



WTien Smith entered the United States Department of Agri- 

 culture at Washington in 1886, research in plant diseases " had 

 only recently been separated from the ordinary botanical work of 

 the department, which then consisted principally of answers to 

 correspondents, and species descriptions of grasses. At that 

 period, and for some time to come," he later explained, "we had 

 no laboratory facilities and scarcely any place we could call our 

 own. A little cubbyhole was apportioned off for the chief, Pro- 

 fessor Scribner, and his assistant," Erwin Smith, "was allowed, 

 by courtesy of Dr. Marx, the department artist, to occupy a desk in 

 his room. We had very few books, and nothing in the way of 

 apparatus beyond the simplest sort of microscopes. . . . The 

 amount of money appropriated by Congress for this line of work 

 in 1887 was $5,000. ... Of special journals devoted to plant 

 pathology there were none," " although in 1887 the Centralblatt 

 fiir Bakteriologie iind Faras'itenkuude was founded and after 1895 

 was to provide " a vast storehouse of the new knowledge." In 

 1883 the Berichte d. d. botanischen Gesellschaft had been started 

 and was affording " a mine of information on botanical subjects," 

 in addition to DeBary's journal, Das Botanische Zeitung, which 

 had been in existence more than four decades. There were also 

 the Botanisches Centralblatt founded in 1880 and the influential 

 Annals of Botany begun in 1887. In 1882 Saccardo had begun to 



^ Fifty years of pathology, op. cit., 20. 



* Plant pathology: a retrospect and prospect, op. cit., 606-607. 



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