Contributions of Botany to Military Efficiency. at 
loose smut and bunt—during that year would have resulted in saving 
thirty-three million bushels of that grain. This might have been added 
to the quantity furnished to our allies in Europe, and might well have 
been an important factor in the military situation. It is clear that these 
loss estimates were important in the execution of the plans of the War 
Board to reduce these losses in the interest of the armies and the civilian 
populations of the United States and her allies. 
Early in 1918 conferences were held in the six districts into which 
the country had been divided for the organization of the emergency 
plant disease work. At these conferences the plant pathologists of each 
district met together with one or more of the commissioners of the War 
Emergency Board to discuss fully and informally the plant disease 
problems of the district. Leaders were elected for the work on each 
special problem, and co-operation for the earliest possible solution of 
such problems was arranged among the workers specially interested. 
In addition to the man-power survey, the crop loss estimates and the 
emergency research organized at the district conferences, the War 
Emergency Board, through one of its commissioners, carried on a pub- 
licity campaign through all available channels for the wider dissemi- 
nation of information as to the importance and methods of plant disease 
control. Provision was also made for the prompt exchange among path- 
ologists of emergency information on methods of control. Thus it was 
sought, by means of mimeographed sheets mailed frequently to all work- 
ers, to make available at the earliest date important new facts which 
could be utilized in an intensive campaign against crop diseases. The 
delay which would have attended publication through the usual channels 
was thus avoided. 
Another department of the work was concerned with the gathering 
and distribution of information as to supplies and prices of the impor- 
tant fungicides and spraying machinery. The production and marketing 
of these most important agencies of plant control had been greatly inter- 
fered with by war conditions in the industries and in transportation. 
The early and unexpected termination of the war prevented the 
activities of the War Emergency Board from bearing the fruit in in- 
creased food supply for the allied nations which might have been ex- 
pected in the second and subsequent years of its existence. Ten months 
from the conception of the plan the war was over, and the possibility 
of its making further contribution to military efficiency through adding 
to the food supply had ceased. This fact, and the impossibility of esti- 
mating the results secured after so short a period of operation, should 
not prevent us from recognizing the value of this unprecedented move- 
ment for co-operation in increasing knowledge in what is probably the 
