10) TENTH ANNUAL REPORT. 
of years these demands promise to develop in increasing 
proportions. 
The institutions of learning which leave their graduates 
without all the training for this work that the state of our 
knowledge affords are missing one of the fairest oppor- 
tunities for usefulness. The graduate who finds that his 
notes on economic mycology fail to connect his parasites 
adequately with the changes in its host, will probably accuse 
his instructor of leaving him to find out for himself what 
he should have been taught in some general manner, at least, 
while he had a student’s leisure and before the unceasing 
demands of actual service pressed upon him. Generally 
speaking, American institutions leave the student in this 
position or offer him an excellent opportunity to make his 
own pathological inferences from physiological instruction. 
In my judgment the demand for well considered instruction 
and research in plant pathology, is already formulated and 
only awaits avenues of expression to make itself felt. It 
would seem that the Land Grant Colleges and State Uni- 
versities are situated at a great advantage by their oppor- 
tunities in the line of courses in a pathological botany that 
shall be pedagogically sound and actually immediately help- 
ful. They have this fine opportunity because of their rela- 
tions to the state at large and to the agricultural com- 
munity in particular, and by either direct or contributory 
connection with the experiment stations and the United 
States Department of Agriculture. Have such courses 
‘been made prominent and are these great institutions real- 
izing their full opportunities? And are the time and facil- 
ities in the way of helpers allotted in our State University or 
elsewhere, such as make nothing more to be desired? To 
both of these questions most would give either a qualified or 
unqualified negative answer. So long as this is true much 
remains to be done for the future of vegetable pathology. It 
may be added that so far as my own inquiries and those of 
certain of my friends have extended, we find plenty of dispo- 
‘sition to create separate chairs in botany in our universities 
‘and properly so, but there is little manifest disposition to pro- 
