386 ADVERSITY, 1874-1912 



innumerable lives of valuable animals. The ancient cow-leech is 

 superseded by practitioners, who detect bacilli almost as unerringly 

 as their medical brethren. The cause of anthrax has, at least, 

 been discovered, and a preventive suggested in inoculation ; the 

 tuberculin test provides the means of detecting latent tuberculosis 

 in cattle ; redwater has been traced to its source ; the minute 

 agent of the virus in swine-fever is revealed ; acorn-fever, which 

 proved fatal to numbers of young cattle in 1900, has been diagnosed 

 and distinguished from mere indigestion. In foot-and-mouth dis- 

 ease, the period of latency or incubation has been defined, though 

 the nature, origin, and means of transmission of the infection still 

 require investigation. In another, yet similar, direction science has 

 achieved new successes peculiarly appropriate to this day of small 

 things, when minute attention to detail often turns loss into gain. 

 Miss Ormerod (1828-1901), for many years the friend and adviser 

 of farmers on the subject of insect pests injurious to the health of 

 animals and plants, left behind her as her life-work a systematised 

 agricultural entomology, which subsequent research continues to 

 enlarge and perfect. The various kinds and infectious natures of 

 fungi which attack trees, fruit, and field or garden crops have been 

 carefully investigated. A new impulse has been given to clean 

 farming by the discovery that weeds, like docks and thistles, 

 harbour the mangold fly ; or, like dandelions or plantains, foster 

 eel-worms ; or, like charlock, house the turnip weevil, harbour the 

 finger-and-toe fungus, feed the turnip fly, and offer winter-quarters 

 to the chrysalids of the diamond-backed moth. Nor has science 

 been content only to point out the dangers ; it has supplied farmers, 

 fruit-growers, and market gardeners with an armoury of remedies, 

 preventives, and disinfectants. From 1882, when soft soap and 

 quassia was first applied to hops, the number of these weapons 

 against the insect or the fungus has rapidly multiplied. Science 

 has proved the value of formalin for the prevention of blindness 

 in oats or smut in barley ; it has tested the use as fungicides of the 

 Bordeaux mixture and iron and copper sulphates, of arsenate of 

 lead and Paris Green as insecticides, of naphthalene for eel-worm, 

 of fumigation with hydrocyanic acid gas, of spraying potatoes with 

 the Woburn Bordeaux mixture, of washing fruit-trees with the 

 Woburn Wash, of destroying charlock at an early stage of growth 

 by spraying with solutions of copper. 



In mechanical invention innumerable improvements have been 



