216 Investigations in Plant Pathology 



became members of a celebrated firm of consulting engineers of 

 New York City. Whipple later was a professor of sanitary engi- 

 neering at Harvard University and his alma mater. Fuller, after a 

 postgraduate course at the University of Berlin and a period with 

 the Massachusetts Board and in charge of the Lawrence Experi- 

 ment Station, performed elaborate tests for the cities of Louisville, 

 Kentucky, and Cincinnati, Ohio, to determine the most feasible 

 method of purifying water, and in 1899 engaged in practice 

 privately as a hydraulic and sanitary engineer. Gary Nathan 

 Calkins, '90, was later a professor of protozoology at Columbia 

 University. The graduate who was to succeed Sedgwick as pro- 

 fessor and head of the department of biology and public health 

 at Massachusetts Institute of Technology was Samuel Cate Pres- 

 cott, '94. In 1895 he became as assistant in biology, in 1896 an 

 instructor, in 1903 assistant professor of industrial biology and 

 bacteriology, in 1909 associate professor, in 1914 professor of 

 industrial microbiology, and in 1922 was placed in charge of the 

 department. 



Plant bacteriology would not figure much in this work for many 

 years. By 1911, however, the research work of Erwin F. Smith in 

 the United States Department of Agriailture had so stimulated 

 Sedgwick's interest that he addressed a letter to Smith, as follows: 



Plant pathology nowadays is a mighty interesting thing, and those of us 

 who twenty or thirty years ago undertook to say that there is really such 

 a subject as Biology, because of the close relationship and the analogous 

 behavior of plants and animals under various conditions, rejoice to find in 

 your work any justification that may be needed for their attitude. 



In 1891, just two decades before, Harry Luman Russell, having 

 found the study of bacterial diseases of plants still conspicuously 

 lacking in Germany, had returned to the United States and regis- 

 tered as a graduate student in pathology and biology at Johns 

 Hopkins University. Even in Koch's laboratory he had found the 

 research interest almost entirely confined to infectious diseases of 

 animals and humans. Carl Fraenkel had been then in immediate 

 charge. Koch directed, supervised, and often worked in the 

 laboratory. Engaged there in study and research had been such 

 workers of distinction as Shibasaburo Kitasato, not yet forty years 

 of age, and Emil von Behring, who together had elaborated an 

 antitoxin for tetanus.^^ In 1890 von Behring, from the blood of 



^'^ Douglas James Guthrie, A history of medicine, op. cit., 287. 



