July 14, 1905.] 



SCIENCE. 



51 



ing and keeping wheat and other tjT)es of 

 grass straw, which is infected by red rust, so 

 as to carry out various studies upon the most 

 successful methods of testing the vitality of 

 the spores from week to week and from month 

 to month. We are now able to announce defi- 

 nitely that the vitality of the red spores 

 (uredospores) of Puccinia graminis, in cer- 

 tain cases, may remain unimpaired by the 

 action of the drying winds of autumn and the 

 intense cold of a North Dakota winter. In 

 some cases we have been able to germinate 

 as high as eighty to ninety per cent, of all 

 the spores under test. We have found these 

 spores successfully surviving upon dead leaves, 

 dead straw and upon the partially dead or 

 green leaves of living grain or grasses. This 

 applies also to a number of other important 

 rusts which attack wheat and allied grasses. 



In the case of Puccinia ruhigo-vera, the 

 smaller wheat rust, it has been found by the 

 writer to be wintering freely in Mississippi, 

 Texas, Illinois, Minnesota and North Dakota 

 both upon living leaves of wheat or winter rye 

 and upon the matured leaves and straw of the 

 same. This fact will of necessity have great 

 weight upon the future investigations of 

 wheat rust. The matter of the barberry stage 

 and other secidial rusts may yet be proved to 

 be of physiological necessity for the perpetua- 

 tion of the species, but it would seem that 

 these need no longer be believed to be a direct 

 yearly necessity to the perpetuation of the 

 rusts concerned. 



Henry L. Bolley. 



NoKTH Dakota Agricultural College. 



CONCERNING THE IDENTITY OF THE FUNGI CAUS- 

 ING AN ANTHRACNOSE OP THE SWEET-PEA 

 AND THE BITTER-ROT OF THE APPLE. 



About a year ago I received some sweet-pea 

 stems from Inwood, W. Va., with a request as 

 to the cause of the plants dying. These stems 

 had dead, shrunken areas on them with masses 

 of pink spores scattered about over the dead 

 areas. There were also a few spore masses on 

 some of the leaves. An examination showed 

 that the dead areas were probably caused by 

 some species of Gloeosporium, but no such 

 fungus has been found as occurring on the 



sweet-pea in the literature that I have had 

 access to. I have called the disease an an- 

 thracnose on account of its resemblaiace to the 

 anthracnoses of some other plants. 



More material was secured at different times 

 during the autumn, and it was my intention 

 to make a personal investigation of the dis- 

 ease until after Mr. A. Lee Post became offi- 

 cially connected with the experiment station 

 and a student in the university, when the 

 problem was assigned to him under my direc- 

 tion. He began a study of the life history 

 of the fungus by means of artificial cultures 

 and inoculations. The results of the investi- 

 gation, up to date, have been presented in the 

 form of a thesis, and will probably be pub- 

 lished later with slight alteration and the addi- 

 tion of new data. 



While examining some of the agar cultures 

 with Mr. Post, I noticed that there was an 

 occasional cell of the mycelium that contained 

 spores, the number of spores in the cells vary- 

 ing. To all appearances the endospores were 

 the same as those borne externally on the 

 hyphaB. This was the first time that I had 

 seen endospores in the mycelium of a fungus 

 other than those found in bacteria, and corre- 

 spondence with some of the leading mycol- 

 ogists has failed to give me any definite light 

 on the subject of endospore formation in the 

 higher fungi. 



The manner of growth of the mycelium and 

 the way the conidia were produced were so 

 characteristic of the bitter-rot fungus of the 

 apple and the one causing the mummy disease 

 of the guava, that Mr. Post made some inocii- 

 lations in apple-agar and in apples. The re- 

 sult of the inoculations on apples was so sim- 

 ilar to the bitter-rot of the apple that a num- 

 ber of mycologists have pronounced it genuine 

 bitter-rot. 



Through correspondence with the person 

 who sent me the diseased sweet-pea stems, I 

 learned that the sweet-peas grew near an apple 

 tree, the fruit of whioh rotted. Just what 

 kind of a rot it was will be determined this 

 fall if possible. This rotting of the apples on 

 the tree near the sweet-peas, suggested the 

 possible identity of the anthracnose of the 

 sweet-pea and bitter-rot of the apple. To prove 



