60 SIXTU ANNUAL REPORT 



an under-ground enemy. Our own method of growing them on trellis^ 

 approaches more nearly these natural conditions than that employed 

 in the ravaged French districts, where the vines are grown in greater 

 proximity and allowed to trail on the ground, or are supported to a 

 single stake. Their soil is also, as a rule, poorer than ours. 



FALSE THEORIES. 



It requires less time to make a false statement than to refute it^ 

 and there will ever be those who prefer to theorize and jump to con- 

 clusions, rather than ascertain facts by the more tedious and laborious 

 inductive method. There exists a certain popular love of the myste- 

 rious — a willingness to rest with the vague and indefinite — which, 

 readily gives support to the wildest notions of things, especially if they 

 be bruited about with a flourish of rhetoric and a semblance of reason. 



The history of Phylloxera is a repetition of the history of many 

 other like diseases. The hard and more weighty facts lay at first hid- 

 den by ignorance, and had to be jostled, by active investigators,, 

 through a superincumbent mass of opposing views and theories, which 

 have either sunk out of view, or been washed away by the resistless 

 force of truth. Many of these theories are too absurd to be noticed^ 

 and I shall only briefly consider those which have, or have had, more 

 or less influence with intelligent persons. Ever since the day when 

 Planchon discovered the real cause of the Phylloxera disease in France^ 

 in the insect now known by that name, there has been a class of 

 writers who have strenuously contended that the insect is the efi'ect 

 and not the cause of the disease. As a rule, the reasons given in sup- 

 port of this view are about as philosophical as that of the darkey 

 who, being asked by his master why the sun goes to the south in the 

 winter, replied : "Well, I don't know, massa, unless he no stand de 

 'clemency of de norf, an' so am 'bliged to go to de souf, where he spe- 

 riences warmer longimitude ! " In spite of the facts that the insect 

 precedes but never follows the rotting of the roots ; that it congre- 

 gates on the most vigorous and succulent portions ; that it is always 

 coexistent with the disease, and is not found in theunafi"ected vine dis- 

 tricts ; in face of the demonstrable hurtfulness of its puncture, and 

 the isolated spots or centers of attack from which the disease often 

 originates, and of the fact that total and prolonged submersion is an 

 effectual cure — men still have the hardihood to compare it to scrofula, 

 in man ; to attribute it to "divers circumstances," "meteorological 

 perturbations," " pathological conditions of the vine, " "superabund- 

 ance of sap too suddenly arrested by atmospheric influences," etc. etc. 

 The arguments are unsatisfactory and the explanations negative and 

 vague, yet the partisans of these view^s number among them some 



