Florida and California Laboratories 275 



authority on peach yellows and bacteiial diseases of truck crops, 

 Swini^lc and Webber authorities on orange blight and other dis- 

 eases of citrous fruits. Pierce an authority on California vine 

 disease and other maladies more or less confined to the agriculture 

 of the Pacific Coast, Galloway an authority on all of the work, 

 and Woods his new assistant and an authority on mosaic tobacco 

 disease, the Division deserved its quickly won reputation of being 

 one of the foremost organizations devoted to the study of plant 

 diseases in the world. The work was producing not only valuable 

 results for science but also farming practice. 



Smith immediately recognized Woods's abilities as a scholarly 

 plant scientist. His fifteen-minute address of April 21, 1894, 

 before the Biological Society of Washington on " The Calorific 

 Effect of Light on Plants " so stimulated Smith that he wrote of it 

 to Spalding who found Woods's work " most interesting and 

 suggestive," and added at the end of his criticism, " Mr. Woods 

 has done an admirable service in showing the insufificiency of the 

 traditional ' simple experiment.' The next thing is to turn on 

 the electric light and see what light without heat will do. Perhaps 

 it has been done. I do not recall a report of it." Mention has 

 been made of the use of hydrocyanic acid gas as a fumigant 

 against certain scales of orange trees in California. Woods, 

 collaborating with P. H. Dorsett, later would extend this treat- 

 ment against scale insects and aphides infesting hot-house plants, 

 and the treatment was to become standard practice in the control 

 of nursery stock diseases." In 1894'^ a preliminary notice was 

 published by Webber of the discovery in Florida of a fungus 

 parasitic on the w^hite fly, an insect w^hich infested orange trees 

 and excreted a honeydew which nourished the fungus of " sooty 

 mold." This was an important finding in line with a principle 

 of investigation being applied by entomologists and pathologists, 

 and which Smith in part described by saying: 



Riley and others conceived the idc;i that the best method of controlling 

 certain scales would be by multiplyini^ their insect parasites, and the 

 threatened destruction of the orange orchards of California by the cottony 

 cushion scale was avoided in this way, viz., by the introduction of a 



"^ Plant pathology: a retrospect and prospect, 608, 1902. 



'* H. J. Webber, Preliminary notice of a fungous parasite on Aleyrodes Citri 

 R. & H., Jour. Mycology 7(4): 363, Aug. 15, 1894. 



