384 Chief of a Laboratory of Plant Pathology 



1903, " in the hope by personal observation of clearing up much 

 that the literature of particular diseases has left in doubt." 

 Farlow answered promptly: 



I am very glad to hear that the work on bacterial diseases of plants on 

 which you have been engaged so long has now reached the stage of pub- 

 lication. Such a work is very much needed and I am sure that there is no 

 one so competent as yourself to treat the subject. . . . [T]he work is sure 

 to be of such a character as to be not only a credit to the [Carnegie] 

 Institution . . . but also a boon to those numerous botanists, vegetable 

 pathologists and scientific agriculturists who, without such a compendium 

 of the results of modern investigation, have at present to derive their 

 information from an endless number of scattered papers in different 

 journals and publications of different societies. 



Farlow characterized the prepared material as a " very valuable 

 work." During these years plant pathologists were adding several 

 systematic productions to the accumulated literature of the science. 

 Such a volume as H. W. Conn's Agricultural bacteriology, pub- 

 lished in 1901 and reviewed in the Experiment Station Record ^^ 

 as " one of the first books in the English language that covers the 

 whole range of the relation of bacteria to agriculture in its broadest 

 sense," was a " good general treatise on the subject." Later, Smith, 

 in his second volume (p. 18) of Bacteria in Relation to Plant 

 Diseases, would notice that but " 5 pages out of 419 " in this 

 work were devoted to the bacterial plant diseases. More technical 

 and restricted in purpose were several other important literary 

 works. In 1904 Klebahn published Die Wirtswechselden Rostpilze 

 which Smith regarded as an " important book on the rusts that 

 have more than one host." ^^ That year, also, appeared Clinton's ^'^ 

 " North American Ustilagineae." Furthermore, several important 

 papers on the parasitic Gloeosporiums were coming out of Europe 

 from various authors. From the standpoint of North American 

 mycological science, however, the most important literary appear- 

 ance of these years was in 1905 when the first and only installment 

 of Farlow's Bibliographical Index of North American Fungi was 

 published. By 1919, the year of Dr. Farlow's death, approximately 

 300,000 references were indexed and available. 



Not until 1909 would a comprehensive American textbook on 



^' 13(7): 623, 1902. 



•^^ Fifty years of pathology, op. cit., 29. 



^* Charles Thorn and E. M. East, George Perkins Clinton, Nat'l Acad, of Set. Biog. 

 Mem. 20: 183-196, 1939. 



