CONTINENTAL NOTES — GERMANY. 205 



destroyer, took its final hand in the game. Whenever such 

 preventive action has been followed, the damage done by the 

 nun plague has been insignificant. 



The Scots pine has even now not run the entire gamut of 

 enemies and diseases to which it is more specially liable, and in 

 its more advanced age, broadly speaking from 40 years upwards, 

 it is exposed to ravages by the pine stem-rot fungus. 



Dr A. Moeller, in his treatise regarding the necessity and 

 possibility of an effective combat with Trametes pini, adopted 

 Hartig's original observations, and, somewhat enlarging thereon, 

 laid down that the sap-wood was entirely free from all attacks, 

 and that the spores of the fungus could find an effective lodgment 

 only in exposed heart-wood ; the broken branches, in which 

 mature wood had already formed, affording convenient doors to 

 the interior of the tree. 



This theory, Moeller's as it is called, was severely questioned. 

 It was stated that, if it were correct, no fungus-attacked trees 

 could exist in the pine forests of Upper Silesia, which for sixty 

 to eighty years had grown up closely and could not therefore have 

 formed heart-wood bearing branches before the completion of 

 their growth in height. Moreover, sporophore brackets were 

 produced attached to bona-fide sap-wood. However, on detailed 

 inquiry, it was found that in these cases the trees had, in the early 

 stages of their growth, been severely barked and deeply scarred by 

 stags, and that the circulation of sap had entirely stopped in the 

 cicatrix which had formed. Even now, in the forty years old forest 

 where every third tree shows the scar of the old wounds, only 

 these are attacked by the fungus, and with one exception the 

 brackets are found on branch stumps. However, Dr Moeller had 

 to modify his statements somewhat, and to include as possible points 

 of infection sapwood in which the growing functions had ceased. 

 The brackets of the Trametes form only on the dead stumps of 

 branches insufficiently impregnated and protected by resin, and, 

 as Hartig expresses it, the fungus uses the dead wood of these 

 branches as bridges, through the unaffected and unattackable 

 living sap-wood, to the heart-wood of the tree. 



The most effective way of dealing with the disease is naturally 

 by the removal of the tree attacked, and in Prussia, between 1905 

 and 1908, 1 16,000,000 cubic feet of timber, or nearly 25 per cent, 

 of the total yield in pine timber, were felled on this account, and 

 thrown on the market. 



