78 



St'uikiug Smut or Bunt in Wheat. 



there was a greater proportion of clean than bunted. With T. levis, 75 per 

 cent, were clean, and with T. tritici, 56 per cent., so that the same plant, as a 

 rule, produces both sound and smutted heads. 



I next examined a large number of bunted plants to try, if possible, to 

 find one in which all the ears were affected. Federation was the variety 

 chosen, because it is specially liable to bunt, as it was infected with T. levis, 

 and 72 per cent, were diseased. On examining 20 diseased stools at random, 

 as in the case of Dexter, the result was as follows : — 



Table VI. ^Bunted and Sound Ears in each Stool of Federation Wheat. 



Out of twenty plants, there were seven entirely bunted, and only 13 per 

 cent, of clean ears. When the variety is particularly susceptible, there may 

 be a considerable proportion entirely bunted, but under our conditions, a 

 mixture of smutted and sound ears in the same plant is the more common. 



Grains of Wheat Partially Bunted. 

 The normal course of the stinking smut fungus is to produce its spores in 

 the ear, and in every ear of the stool attacked, as well as in every grain of the 

 ear, and the contents of each grain is converted into a foetid mass of spores. 

 But when a number of diseased specimens are examined, it is found that the 

 spores may occasionally occur on the stem, as well as in the ear, and that it 

 is not at all unusual in certain seasons for only some of the ears in a shoot to 

 be bunted, while a number of the grains in the affected ear may escape, and 

 even the grain itself may be only partially diseased. I have not, personally, 

 found bunt-spores elsewhere than in the ear, but Berkeley^ records an in- 

 stance of a streak of bunt appearing on the stem. The plant to which he 

 refers in the following sentence was grown from a grain infected with the spores 

 of bunt : — " In one of the bunted plants, not only the ear was diseased, but 

 there was a streak of bunt upon the stem, in which the foetid smell and 



