XYI STOEY OF BUST IN WHEAT 195 



the gardens, and the farmers could give no in- 

 telligible reason why barberry bushes were bad for 

 corn, but the Arabs arid the farmers were right and 

 Mohammed and the botanists wrong none the less. 



Sir Joseph Banks felt that if the farmers were 

 right about the barberries there must be some 

 reason, and therefore he offers one. " It is," he 

 says, " notorious to all botanical observers that the 

 leaves of the barberry are very subject to the attack 

 of a yellow parasitic fungus, larger, but otherwise 

 much resembling the rust in corn. 



" Is it not more than possible that the parasitic 

 fungus of the barberry and that of wheat are one 

 and the same species, and that the seed transferred 

 from the barberry to the corn is one cause of the 

 disease ? " 



We notice that Sir Joseph Banks only suggests 

 this as one cause of the disease, his idea evidently 

 being that the fungus could grow indiscriminately 

 on barberry and wheat. There is added to his 

 paper as an appendix a letter from Mr. T. A. Knight, 

 who was a distinguished agriculturist living at this 

 time. In this letter Mr. Knight details some 

 experiments which he had performed to try to 

 find out whether the fungus found on barberry had 

 anything to do with wheat blight. He succeeded 

 in showing that wheat sown round an infected 

 barberry bush all became infected with blight by 



