Interrelation of Plant and Animal Pathology 55 



THE INTERRELATION OF PLANT AND 

 ANIMAL PATHOLOGY 



BY SAMUEL M. BAIN, UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE. 



[Read before the Academy, December 1, 1916, being the Annual Address of 

 the retiring President.] 



The high degree of specialization attained by scientific investi- 

 gators within the past century has been one of the factors contrib- 

 utory to the remarkable progress of science during this period. 

 At the same time it must be admitted that men with a very much 

 narrowed field for inspection are in distinct danger of underrating 

 the importance of fields foreign to them. They are also in danger 

 of too hasty generalizations from their observed facts, and often- 

 times may fail to generalize where generalization is distinctly in- 

 dicated. 



I have dared to attempt to discuss before you this evening certain 

 analogies and antitheses in two fields of science which have rarely, 

 if ever, been cultivated by the same individual. I have feebly at- 

 tempted to cultivate a small area of one of these fields, but make 

 no claim to knowledge at first hand in the other. I have been able 

 to gather a few facts in recent years concerning plant pathology, 

 but know very little in a scientific way of animal or human path- 

 ology, however intimate an acquaintance I may have acquired as 

 host in the entertainment of a liberal share of pathogenic parasites 

 in my own body. 



Yet the history of the advancement of medical science in the last 

 fifty years is hardly such as to discourage trespass on its territory 

 by cultivators of other fields. It would be difficult, for instance, 

 for medical science to pair two peers of Pasteur and Metchnikoff, 

 the one a poacher from the field of physics, the other a zoologist. 

 What a man sees as an investigator in any field of observational 

 science is not dependent so much on the image cast on his retina, 

 as upon the images impressed on his mind by former study and 

 his ability to call up and to correlate these mental images with 

 those new ones presented. The scientific mind is then a sort of 

 kaleidoscope whose geometric pictures depend upon the crystalized 



