SOME FUNGUS DISEASES OF PLANTS AND 

 THEIR TREATMENT. 



It is the purpose of this bulletin to call the attention 

 of farmers to the causes of certain losses in their crops, and 

 the treatment by which some of them may be profitably 

 prevented. The injuries caused to crops by insects have 

 long been known and understood ; because in most cases 

 the insects and their methods of operation could be seen 

 with the naked eye. But there is another class of injuries, 

 know as blights, rusts, smuts, mildews, etc., which have not 

 been well understood, for the reason that the nature of their 

 cause could only be made out by the aid of the microscope. 

 These diseases have been attributed to various causes, 

 usually some condition of the soil or the weather, but it 

 is now known that they are due to the growth on the 

 affected plants of minute parasitic plants, which as a class 

 are called fungi (fungus is the singular, fungi the plural). 



The fungi, while being as truly plants, differ in many of 

 their characteristics from the plants on which they grow. 

 Most of them are very small, so as to be invisible to the 

 naked eye, except when growing in considerable quantity. 

 They do not possess roots, stems, leaves, and flowers like 

 ordinary plants, but consist chiefly of minute slender 

 threads or tubes, which grow in or upon the tissues of the 

 diseased plants, drawing nourishment from them in some- 

 thing the same way that the roots of an ordinary plant 

 extend through the soil and draw nourishment from it. It 



