UTAH ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 107 
which spores germinate and from this date on this type of 
study, together with infection and cytological study has 
engaged the attention of many of the foremost mycologists 
and phytopathologists. In 1858, Kuhn followed directly 
the penetration of the germ tubes in wheat. The most 
scholarly epoch-making and accurate work, however, has 
been done since the eighties of the last century by a Ger- 
man known by the name of Brefeld. Since that date, Bre- 
feld has been publishing on this very important subject and 
to him we turn for the final word. Up to 1896, all work 
on the smut question took it for granted that infection al- 
ways took place through the young seedling, but, in 1896, 
Maddox, working then in Australia, discovered for the first 
time that blossom infection occurred in the wheats. This 
was afterwards rediscovered by Brefeld in 1905, working 
in Germany. While Maddox first discovered floral infec- 
tion, still the very important point, whether infection takes 
place through the young seedling or flower remained un- 
known until 1905, when our German Brefeld seems to 
have settled conclusively to the general acceptance of all 
phytopathologists that both seedling and flower may be in- 
fected, but when a smut works through the flower, usually 
it infects but very slightly through the seedling. 
KINDS OF SMUT USED IN BLOSSOM INFECTION EXPERI- 
MENTS. In determining blossom infection in the host plants 
of smut fungi, those forms come first and chiefly 
under consideration whose spores are powdery and whose 
spore masses are easily scattered by the wind and thus 
distributed. These are first of all the different forms of 
loose smuts which occur in our grains, the loose smuts of 
barley, of wheat, and of oats; and, by the way, it should be 
stated that the general impression is that these smuts do 
not occur in the arid region. In fact, in some fields in 
Utah, I have found some of these smuts as extensively dis- 
tributed as in some of the fields of the East. The spores 
of loose smut, however, are not the only ones which have 
been considered for blossom infectio» study. The corn 
smut spores have been shown to live saprophytically in the 
soil and bud finally producing what we term air conidia, 
