Transactions of The Royal Society of Canada 



SECTION V. 

 Series III MAY, 1920 Vol. XIV 



PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS 



Plant Pathology: Its Status and its Outlook 

 By J. H. Faull, B.A., Ph.D., F.R.S.C. 



(Read May Meeting, 1920) 



Plant pathology is one of the youngest of the biological sciences, 

 a botanical development of the last fifty years, but especially of the 

 last quarter of a century. It came into being about the same time 

 as the science of bacteriology, but because of its less obvious relation- 

 ship to the preservation of human life, fewer workers were attracted 

 to it, and its advance was at first very slow. Within recent years, 

 however, it has gained enormous momentum, and to-day a larger 

 number of botanists are devoted to the study of plant diseases and the 

 means of coping with them than to any other single phase of plant life. 

 This quickening has been especially marked in America, where a genera- 

 tion back the recognized plant pathologists could have been counted 

 on the fingers of one hand. Twenty years ago they were beginning to 

 make themselves heard; in 1908 they were strong enough to organize 

 a society devoted to plant pathology with an enrolment of 130 charter 

 members; by 1918 the membership of the American Phytopathological 

 Society had more than tripled and included 45 per cent of the botanists 

 of the United States and Canada. 



The reason for the late development of plant pathology is not far 

 to seek. Certainly it has not been because the ravages of plants by 

 disease had not been observed, for frequent references to blights and 

 mildews and rusts are to be found in the Hebrew, the Greek, the Latin 

 and other early literatures as well as in the more modern. The 

 fact is that up to the middle of the last century science was incapable 

 of solving phytopathological problems; no progress had been made in 

 understanding the causes of plant diseases or in devising satisfactory 

 means of control. The foremost scientists regarded them as conse- 

 quent upon unfavorable weather conditions, and the superstitious 

 considered them to be visitations of supernatural origin. The possi- 

 bility that fungi or bacteria might in some cases be responsible for 

 plant maladies was occasionally suggested, but without sufficient 

 demonstration to serve as the basis of a working hypothesis. It is 



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