Fungous Disi:asi;s or Pi anis. Pi:a( h Yr.LLows l4l 



his translation and publication of the Munich professor's address 

 in 188S on "Recent hivestigations of Smut Fungi and Smut 

 Diseases." *" 



Brcfcld [he later wrote] has shown for many of the smuts that they can 

 vegetate for long periods in forms resembling yeasts. In a magnificent 

 paper on corn smut the same author has shown clearly that, unlike most 

 smuts, the pustules appear in about fourteen days from the time of infec- 

 tion, and that only young, actively growing tissues can be infected. 



What seems to have interested Smith in the work of Brefeld 

 as much as anything, however, were his methods of culture study 

 and the comparison of his classification of genera, subgenera, and 

 species of fungi with those of DeBary. 



In 1885 Jens Ludwig Jensen ^^ had begun in Denmark to investi- 

 gate smuts in cereals, and his blossom infection experiments were 

 of immediate value to workers in experiment stations of the grain- 

 growing states of the central west. In 1887 he treated oats experi- 

 mentally with hot water for five minutes at a temperature of 

 around 55° C. and discovered that, without damaging the oats' 

 germinating power, the smut was killed. This, Ravn has said,^® 

 was "the starting point for the development of the 'Jensen hot- 

 w^ater treatment,' " and soon the remedy was extended against 

 smuts in barley, Bromus, and other plants, and to prevent types 

 of damping off in sugar beets and mangels. In 1883-1884 he had 

 published his method for disinfecting seed potatoes by heat, but 

 the hot air, effective against the potato fungus, proved less so 

 than the hot water against the grain maladies. Furthermore, the 

 heat potato-treatment was superseded by Bordeaux mixture. It 

 had been known for a century that copper sulphate could be used 

 to free seed wheat from the germs of hard smut; but, when lime 

 w'as added, the danger of injuring the wheat foliage was reduced 

 and Bordeaux mixture became important in this connection, also."" 



Jensen's paper, " The propagation and prevention of smut in 

 oats and barley," was made available to English-reading scientists 



""^Jour. Myc. 6 (1): 1-8; (2): 59-71, 1890; 6 (4): 153-164, 1891. 



"F. K(<lpin Ravn, Jens Ludwig Jensen, Phytopathology 7(1): iff., 1917; E. C. 

 Large, Danish hot water, The advance of the fungi, op. cit., 240-247; H. H. 

 Whetzel, op. cit., 81-85 (including an account of the life and work of the Danish 

 botanist Frederick George Emil Rostrup). 



-^ F. K. Ravn, op. cit. 



•"J. C. Arthur, Hist, and scope of plant path., op. cit., 160-161. 



