52 British Uvedineea and Ustilaginee. 
It is quite unnecessary to quote any further from Mr. 
Young’s correspondents upon this point. 
The injurious influence of the barberry was, however, a 
matter of observation only at this time. Various sugges- 
tions were made as to the cause of this: some affirmed the 
barberry bush exhaled a noxious effluvium ; others, that 
the pollen of its flowers poisoned the wheat ; others, again, 
that it appropriated to itself all the nourishment from the 
soil in its- vicinity. 
In 1805, however, Sir Joseph Banks, in his paper on 
“ Wheat Mildew,” alluding to the subject before us, men- 
tions the belief as being prevalent amongst farmers, but 
scarcely credited by botanists, and points out the resem- 
blance the yellow fungus on barberry has to rust, although 
it is larger. He says,* “Is it not more than possible 
that the parasitic fungus of the barberry and that of wheat 
are one and the same species, and that the seed is trans- 
ferred from the barberry to the corn?” 
The suggestion of our eminent countryman was soon 
put to the test of experiment by a totally independent 
observer. 
The honour of being the first to demonstrate the con- 
nection between the barberry A®cidium and the wheat 
mildew belongs to a Danish schoolmaster, who lived in the 
village of Hammel, near Aarhus, in Jutland, at the begin- 
ning of the present century. In 1818, the Royal Agricul- 
tural Society of Denmark published a paper by Schoeler, 
“On the Pernicious Influence which the Barberry Bush 
exercises on Cereals.”f This paper was almost over- 
looked until Mr. Nielsen brought it under notice in 1874, 
in his capacity as Consulting Botanist to the Royal Agri- 
* Banks, ‘‘ Annals of Agriculture,” vol. xliii. p. 521. 
+t Om Schoeler, ‘‘ Berberissens skudelige Indflydelse paa Sceden,” Lazda:- 
homminske Tidender (1818), part viii. p. 289; Nielsen, Ugeskrift for Land- 
media, 1884. 
