140 Pathologist U. S. Department of Agriculture 



States Department of Agriculture was publishing not only transla- 

 tions of the papers by Millardet and others but also sending out 

 circulars to encourage trial experiments on the remedies for 

 Peronospora and black-rot of the grape in this country. Scribner 

 reported -° that the results in France from 



the use of cupric fungicides for Peronospora viticola fully confirm previous 

 statements and experiments. Those detailed by Mr. Millardet in Joz/rfial 

 d' Agriculture Pratique, November 25, 1886, are especially interesting. 

 The experiments at Dauzac and Beaucaillou were conducted either by 

 himself or by Mr. David. Eighteen remedial mixtures, dry or fluid, were 

 tried very carefully with the necessary control experiments, and full memo- 

 randa were made from time to time of the condition of the various plots. 

 The experimental fields covered in all about 5 acres. 



About this time Millardet was investigating another vine patho- 

 gene, the phylloxera. For this there was introduced American vine 

 stock, resistant to the disease, which, when grafted onto suscep- 

 tible European varieties, saved the vineyards and the industries 

 dependent on them."^ His Bordeaux mixture, however, which 

 "remained for a quarter of a century the most efficient and most 

 universally applicable fungicide known,"" became "a sovereign 

 remedy not only for the ravages of the grape Peronospora, but 

 also for many other diseases of cultivated plants, including black 

 rot of the grape and the devastating mildew [Phytophthora) of 

 the potato. This," Smith believed, ^^ "was the first great advance 

 in plant therapeutics." At one time this treatment was "hailed as 

 a general panacea for all plant diseases," and later it was used 

 effectively against other maladies, among which were leaf spot of 

 pear, and apple scab.^* 



We do not know when Smith first became definitely interested 

 in European and American researches in rusts and smuts of grains. 

 His review "^ in 1889 of two new volumes of Oscar Brefeld's 

 Untersuchungen aus dem Gesammtgebiete der Mykologie. For- 

 setzting der Schim^nel tind Hefenpihe preceded by almost a year 



'"Report of the Mycological Section for 1886, op. cit., 99-101. 

 " H. H. Whetzel, op. cit., 65. 

 '^lde?/2, 58-59; 63, quotation at p. 65. 

 '^ Fifty years of pathology, op. cit., 19-20. 



** Plant pathology: A retrospect and prospect, op. cit., 608; H. H. Whetzel, 

 op. cit., 59. 



''^Journal of Mycology 5 (2): 98-102, 1889- 



