278 DISEASES OF FIELD & GARDEN CROPS. [OH. 



In the same year it was recorded in Vik, in Norway, by 

 Mr. Westrem, the director of the Agricultural School. 

 During the next year it had greatly extended itself and 

 was recorded from Sogndal, as well as from Denmark in 

 both years. In 1843 the disease was very destructive in 

 Western Jutland, and in 1844 the potato disease was 

 epidemical in St. Helena and Canada. From the pub- 

 lished accounts of the periods mentioned, it may be seen 

 that the potato murrain was then exactly as we see it 

 now. It appeared at a similar period of the year, and 

 during the typical moist warm weather so favourable to 

 the growth of the fungus. The dark disease blotches were 

 on the leaves and the tubers were murrain-stained and 

 rotten. The offensive odour so familiar to us now was 

 then specially noticed. The next year, 1845, was the 

 ever memorable year of the great outburst of the potato 

 disease over Western Europe, from Norway to Bordeaux, 

 and the northern parts of the United States. In 1845 

 the fungus of the potato murrain acquired its greatest 

 possible power for destruction. It was first noticed in the 

 south of England in the middle of August, and in a fort- 

 night it had spread over every part of the British Isles. 

 So apparently sudden and destructive was this attack, 

 that in the month of September it was hardly possible to 

 procure potatoes unstricken by the murrain. From 1845 

 till now we have never been free from the assailing 

 fungus ; sometimes the attacks are extremely virulent at 

 other times slight ; sometimes the fungus is common on 

 various field and garden plants allied to the potato at 

 other times very little of the fungus is to be seen. Mr. 

 Duncan Stuart has stated in the North British Agriculturist 

 for 3d October 1883, that the fungus of the potato disease 

 has never yet appeared in the Island of Eum, fifteen 

 miles from the mainland, on the west coast of Scotland, 

 and seven miles to the south of Skye. An exhaustive 

 account, and the best ever written of the rise and spread 

 of the potato disease in Europe, is given in the first volume 



