446 First European Journey 



copy of it to you at Marseilles. We are still working on the subject, because 

 there are a number of very interesting points in connection with it which 

 are not yet settled. I have been crazy over the subject for a half year or 

 more, because I think it is related to malignant animal tumors in its method 

 of growth and development. . . . There is a very interesting tumor on pine ■ 

 trees in south France, not very far from Marseilles. It has been reported 

 from Coarze near Hyeres, but I fancy it occurs in quite a good many 

 localities in the Departments of the Maritime Alps and Var. It looks some- 

 what like Peridermium galls. There has never been any good work done on 

 the disease. I have been anxious for years to get hold of it. I got it once 

 from Paris, but the thing was old and dead and I could not do anything 

 with it in the way of cultures. If you come across any tumors on pines in 

 southern France of such description I wish you would gather a lot of them 

 for me, especially the younger living ones. Tubeuf in Munich has recently 

 published a paper on a bacterial gall of other species of pine which he 

 found somewhere in Germany, and I suspect they are identical, but no one 

 can say. 



Smith, therefore, must have delivered an illustrated lecture on 

 crown gall of plants before the Buffalo Academy of Medicine 

 prior to addressing the American Association for Cancer Research. 

 But at each event he had been preeminently a plant pathologist 

 and plant bacteriologist, and for good reasons. The work in his 

 Laboratory covered a range of investigational materials — forest 

 and cultivated tree species, garden and farm field crops, orchard 

 and greenhouse materials, wild plant species — in such numbers 

 and from all parts of the world that probably no similar laboratory 

 of the North American continent, perhaps of the world, approxi- 

 mated it in scope and influence. 



At the Boston meeting of the Botanical Society of America in 

 1909 Smith had been elected president of the society for the 

 ensuing year of 1910. This was the year when as another affiliate 

 of the American Association for the Advancement of Science the 

 American Phytopathological Society " held its first annual meeting 

 in cooperation with the Botanical Society and Section G of the 

 Association. Dr. F. C. Newcombe congratulated Smith. " If you 

 live a little longer," he said, " we shall have to form a new society; 

 otherwise the field of presidencies will be exhausted by you. But 

 do not let this remark bother you. I know you can be just as 



■'^ C L. Shear, First decade of the American Phytopathological Society, Phyto- 

 pathology 9(4): 165-170, Apr. 1919. 



