210 Investigations in Plant Pathology 



in horticulture as indicated by the self-fruitfulness of some varie- 

 ties while others to set fruit require cross-pollination by insects. 



Waite's carefully prepared bulletin 5, '" The Pollination of Pear 

 Flowers," a scholarly work, replete with the results of careful, 

 scientific, experimental study performed over two years, would 

 appear, published by the Division of Vegetable Pathology, in 1894. 

 Waite admitted that, while the work was not strictly pathological, 

 its origins had sprung from what was at first a pathological in: 

 vestigation. His conclusions, arrived at from extensive experiments 

 conducted at the Old Dominion orchard at Chestnut Farm, 

 Virginia, at the Smith and Slosson orchards at Geneva, New York, 

 in the Eilwanger and Barry orchard at Rochester and at Brockport, 

 New York, offered substantiated facts, valuable to advance pure 

 science in horticulture as well as practical rules which the farmer 

 should follow in planting orchards of mixed varieties.*'^ 



In 1890 twenty-nine botanists were employed at various agri- 

 cultural experiment stations over the United States. When Halsted 

 asked them to list what problems appeared most immediate in 

 their states, sixteen replied " fungous diseases of cultivated plants." 

 Studies of grasses and forage crops, weeds and their migration, 

 reforestation and forest trees, waste land planting, cross-fertiliza- 

 tion of plants, relations of climate and soil to vegetation, seed 

 testing, and allied subjects, were ranked in order next in import- 

 ance. One botanist, unnamed, considered bacterial diseases of 

 plants as among the more important research subjects. '° By 1893 

 thirty-two stations employed botanists. Fungous diseases of plants 

 and their treatment was still the favored investigation subject, 

 and, joined to this, was a growing interest in plant bacterial 

 diseases. Many botanists were yet preoccupied with systematizing 

 their native flora. A few were tracing life histories of fungi. 

 Some few had inaugurated physiological experiments.'^ 



George Francis Atkinson, who on October 1, 1892, had left 

 the Alabama station and been appointed cryptogamic botanist 



** See pp. 80-82 of Bulletin 5. See also Waite's article, Treatment of pear leaf- 

 blight in the orchard, Jour. Mycology. 7(4): 333-338, Aug. 15, 1894, in which are 

 set forth the author's experiments carried on in the orchard of the Old Dominion 

 Fruit Co., on James River, near Scotland, Virginia, and elsewhere. Waite had 

 begun in 1890 at Thomasville, Georgia, to observe the role of insect visitors in pear 

 flowers. See Bulletin 5: 17. Fairchild performed the experiments at Geneva. 



''"Botanical Gazette 15: 279, 1890. 



'''■Botanical Gazette 18: 81, 1893. 



