TOBACCO 265 



seed of a pure strain was supplied to the estates in 1904. 

 At the present time all estates, with the exception of two, 

 employ seed of selected pure strains. On all seed plants 

 the corollas are surrounded by klamboe bags to prevent 

 pollen entering from outside, so that nearly all plantations 

 in the Vorstenlanden are derived from self-fertilized seed. 

 If at first some planters were afraid of " degeneration " 

 through continued self-fertilization, they never refer 

 to it now, and the estates now provide all their seed 

 plants with klamboe bags. One result of the cultivation 

 of pure strains is that any sound plant in the planta- 

 tion may be selected as a seed plant, so that one may 

 often see a collection of many hundreds of seed plants 

 close together with the peculiar and very striking white 

 klamboe bags, whilst formerly a selection had to be 

 made from seed plants spread over the whole of the 

 estate. 



As the testing station, in making a selection, had to 

 observe the wishes of the planters with regard to the 

 requirements of a good strain, the result has been that 

 nearly the whole of the Vorstenlanden now only use two 

 strains, which are of almost identical type. This has 

 caused the European market to complain of late years 

 of too much homogeneity in the Vorstenlanden tobacco 

 brands. This is truly a great triumph for the selection 

 method, and happily it is an evil which can very easily 

 be remedied by isolating new strains possessing different 

 properties. This work has already commenced, so that 

 the ideal of the testing station will probably be realized 

 within a few years, viz., that each estate shall cultivate 

 a pure strain of its own, suitable as to soil, elevation, 

 etc., which will again supply the European market with 

 different varieties o<f Vorstenland tobacco. 



The tobacco plant is very susceptible to various 

 diseases. In the Vorstenlanden two of these are of the 

 utmost significance, the " Lanas disease," caused by 

 Phytophthora nicotians, and the " Mosaic disease," the 

 cause of which is a matter of dispute. The first of these 

 two diseases exercises its injurious influence on the yield, 

 and the second on the quality of the tobacco. To combat 

 these two diseases is a very difficult matter, and so far 

 all efforts to conquer them have failed. Yet it is toler- 



