442 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXVI. No. ( 



Dr. Smith seems to think that the ginseng 

 fungus is not identical with the watermelon 

 fungus, although he himself does not appear 

 to have done any work upon it. I am. per- 

 fectly willing to admit that the two fungi may 

 not prove to be identical, and will bear no 

 personal ill will to any one who may establish 

 the facts. There are, however, certain points 

 in the communication mentioned on which a 

 few words may be said at this time. 



He doubts my identification of the ginseng 

 fungus and criticizes me for not making " any 

 comparative study of the two fungi, although 

 it would have been easy " to obtain the melon 

 fungus. I think that the following letter 

 gives one very good reason why I was unable 

 to compare the ginseng fungus with the wilt 

 fungus he studied. 



U. S DEPABTMENT OF AGEICULTUEE, 



Bureau of Plant Industry 

 Vegetable Pathological and Physio- 

 logical Investigations 

 Laboratory of Plant Pathology. 



Washington, D. C, Jan. 31, 1905 

 Me. Howabd S. Eeed, 

 University of Missouri, 



Columbia, Missouri 

 Dear Sir: In looking over my snowed-under 

 desk yesterday I found your letter of October 27, 

 and am very much afraid it was unanswered. 

 I regret to say that I have no cultures of the 

 fungus which you wish, to wit, Neocosmospora, 

 described in Bulletin 17 of the Div. of Veg. Phys. 

 and Path. I have not worked at all on the dis- 

 ease now for a long time and allowed all the 

 cultures to die. It would really take all of one 

 person's time, and perhaps rather more, to keep 

 going in good condition cultures of all the things 

 that we work with, and it occasionally happens 

 that one or another dies, or is lost for the time. 

 If I come across it again, I will try to keep in 

 mind that you wish a culture. 

 Yours very truly, 



(Sig.) Ebwin F. Smith, 

 In Charge of Laboratory of 

 Plant Pathology 



The fact that I did not find perithecia seems 

 to impel a particularly sharp shaft of criti- 

 cism at me. In this connection the reader 



will permit me to refer to the bulletin written 

 by Dr. Smith, mentioned in the foregoing 

 letter (p. 10). 



. . . the conidial stage of the watermelon fungus 

 (spore taken in July from the interior of a ves- 

 sel) has been cultivated for five years on a great 

 variety of media, including potato, without show- 

 ing a trace of perithecia, although from time to 

 time special efforts were made to find a sub- 

 stratum which would lead to the production of 

 perithecia. This is the strain of fungus which 

 has proved so actively parasitic in the hands of 

 the writer. 



He states again (p. 11) : 



No perithecia ever developed in- any of the cul- 

 tures made from internal or external conidia 

 taken from the cotton or watermelon. 



Having only the conidial stages to start 

 with, it is not surprising that I did not obtain 

 the perithecial stages. 



In his haste to criticize my work he ap- 

 pears to have fallen into the same grievous 

 heresy of which he accuses me. From what 

 I said concerning the parasitism of one 

 species of the form-genus Fusarium, he reck- 

 lessly gained the impression that I had made 

 sweeping statements concerning the parasitism 

 of that entire genus. If he will take the 

 trouble of again reading my note in Science^ 

 he will find that the closing sentence espe- 

 cially restricts my statements concerning weak 

 parasitism to the form I isolated from the 

 ginseng plant. After carefully reexamining 

 the text of the bulletin and also the note, I 

 find nothing which conveys the impressions 

 which he has apparently gained. This seems 

 to be an " unwarranted inference " in his 

 " course in logic." 



It is a matter of no little satisfaction that 

 in this last communication he has reported the 

 outcome of inoculation experiments by a 

 colleague in which sterile soil was used. In 

 his earlier work he used " good earth " but 

 does not appear to have taken the very im- 

 portant precaution of excluding all other 

 organisms from the soil. Considering the 

 prevalence of other soil fungi, it is surprising 

 that he should have neglected to insure 



' Vol. XXIII., p. 751. 



