18 PROTECTION OF PLANTS — ^1922-23 



separation has been so complete that many people fail to see the connection or 

 the necessity of a training in botany as a preparation for the more specialized 

 lines of work. It appears to the writer that this is a great misfortune which 

 must be corrected in the near future. 



But let us return to the taxonomic study of the fungi, which from its begin- 

 ning has been recognized as a division of botany and which has never been sepa- 

 rated from the mother subject. The non-flowering plants were very mysterious 

 to the early students of botany, and no very great advance was made with them, 

 especially with fungi, until the microscope reached a degree of perfection which 

 enabled the students of the subject to study the structure of the larger forms 

 and to recognize the minute forms. Very naturally taxonomy was the first 

 branch of the subject to be developed and this was followed later by morphology 

 and physiology. The perfection of the microscope made possible the study 

 of bacteria and the development of bacteriology, which may be considered 

 a branch of botany. But it is a branch which very soon became more closely 

 associated with animal pathology, abnormal physiology and bio-chemistry 

 than with the mother subject. The development of these two branch subjects 

 —mycology and bacteriology — became the foundation on which we are now 

 building the superstructure — plant pathology. The sudden rise of plant pathol- 

 ogy is due primarily to the extensive and intensive studies of the mycologists. 

 In fact the plant pathology of to-day would be impossible if the were not for 

 this mass of information, which has been accumulated by the mycologists 

 of the past three-quarters of a century. These mycologists were well trained 

 in botany and in most cases gave very little thought to the economics of the 

 subject. They were what some people pleased to call "students of pure botany" 

 but they laid the foundations for one of the most important divisions of applied 

 botany. 



Although plant pathology is of recent origin, it is just as difficult to say 

 when it began as it is to designate the beginnings of botany. Plant diseases 

 are referred to in the Bible, and in writings of the early Greeks, Romans and 

 other peoples, but they were usually attributed to soil, climate, movements 

 of celestial bodies or to some guperstitions or supernatural agency. Strange 

 as it may be, these same ideas are common within out own communities to-day 

 The early study of the fungi did not contribute much to the study of plant 

 diseases. However, several publications bearing directly on plant diseases 

 came out during the latter part of the 18th and early part of the 19th centuries. 

 The most important are De Morbis Plantarum by von Bellinger of the Austrian 

 Tyrol in 1773; a second part of J. J. Plenck's Physiologie et Pathologia Plan- 

 tarum in 1794; a work on diseases of fruit trees by J. M. Ritter von Ehrenfels 



