1893- NOTES AND COMMENTS. 87 



in the interests of agriculture, on the cockchafer by wholesale infec- 

 tion of the larvae with this fungus. Such methods have been tried, 

 as everyone knows, by Continental mycologists and bacteriologists 

 in certain cases, from the Australian rabbit downwards. In this 

 country very little has been said or done, biologists being mindful, 

 no doubt, of the luminous idea evolved by an eminent member of 

 their body, and gravely proposed to his French colleagues, that they 

 should exterminate the Phylloxera by means of the yeast fungus ! 

 No wonder if there has been a dearth of ideas on the subject in this 

 country since then. M. Giard, however, has made a truly scientific 

 study of the fungus and its artificial culture, and of the possibility of 

 employing it in the manner indicated. It certainly deserves to be 

 rewarded with a practical success. The great difficulty in the way 

 of most cases of the kind is, of course, that which has at all times 

 prevented the proper testing of the celebrated method of catching 

 birds by putting salt on their tails. Every mycologist knows, how- 

 ever, the extraordinary powers of multiplication possessed by fungi, 

 and the extraordinary diffusion of their spores. By assisting nature 

 with artificial cultivations of the fungus, M. Giard has obtained a 

 gratifying success so far as his proposal has been tested, and his 

 method has plainly numerous advantages, as a natural and otherwise 

 harmless one, over the usually futile one of sprinkling chemical insecti- 

 cides. Such methods as M. Giard's deserve not only success but ■ 

 further developments, and it is to be hoped that they will not be 

 hindered by vain talk of the dangers of "letting loose the germs of 

 disease " generally indulged in by newspaper writers, who are willing 

 to believe that one bacillus differs from another only in degree of 

 rapacity in attacking the human body. To assist nature in such 

 affairs is surely better than to squirt petroleum and other chemical 

 (patent) insecticides over our gardens and fields. Some of these 

 have a mischievous effect on the soil, and most have no measurable 

 effect on the parasite ; all are "quack medicines." For example, it 

 was once proposed to cure the potato disease by the application of a 

 substance costing about ^ly per acre, as if this were the difference 

 to the farmer between a good crop and a bad one of potatoes ; more- 

 over, the substance in question was useless for the purpose. Agri- 

 culturists should, therefore, welcome the development of all such 

 rational proposals as this one of M. Giard, the fruit of much observa- 

 tion and ingenuity. 



Alg^e. 



The second part of the Phycological Memoirs has just been published 

 and amply fulfils the promise of the first number — indeed this part 

 seems to us to be the more interesting of the two, dealing, as it does, 

 with many of the vexed questions in the study of Algae, which can 

 only be settled satisfactorily in a place of such vast resource as tlie 



