556 BULLETIN 347 
that is, that the fungus has always been in this country as an incon- 
spicuous saprophyte or a weak parasite, and that it became virulent 
about 1904 because the trees were in a weakened condition due to winter 
injuries and unfavorable weather conditions, as well as faulty silvicultural 
methods such as continuous coppicing. He briefly sums up his reasuns 
for his theory as follows (1913: 416-417): : 
“The writer’s reasons for believing the chestnut blight is native to 
this country may be summarized as follows: (1) It has never been found 
in any other country. (2) It is very closely related to Endothia gyrosa, 
apparently developing from it as a distinct variety, and this species is 
a native fungus in this country as well as in Europe. (3) The limits of 
distribution of E. gyrosa and the chestnut blight overlap at least in the 
region covered by Washington, D. C., to southern Pennsylvania, while 
E. gyrosa occurs south of this common area and the chestnut blight north 
of it. (4) We have previously had serious troubles of chestnut trees in 
this country, and there seems to have been a continued northward move- 
ment of these, culminating in the recent trouble in the northern limit. 
While the chestnut blight has been definitely connected only with this 
last trouble, the previous ones have never been really explained. (5) The 
suddenness, et cetera, of the recent blight outbreak has been adequately 
explained by the writer through the unusual environmental conditions 
that have weakened the chestnuts in the general regions where the out- 
break has occurred. (6) The fact that the chestnut blight fungus was 
never reported before this outbreak is no more difficult to explain than 
the fact that E. gyrosa had never been reported on chestnut in this country 
until by the writer a year ago, and yet this is a native fungus widely dis- 
tributed on chestnut in the South, and has been known there on 
other hosts since 1822, when described by Schweinitz. They both were, 
in fact, merely overlooked on the chestnut. (7) Our cultures of E. gyrosa 
vary more from their normal type than do those of the variety parasitica, 
and some of these have varied somewhat toward the variety parasitica 
type. This, however, may have been due in part to bacterial contamina- 
tion, et cetera.” 
The strong point in Clinton’s argument, and the missing link in Met- 
calf’s, was that the fungus could not be found in eastern Asia. But this 
link was supplied during the last year, when Fairchild (1913) reported 
the finding of the fungus in northern China by Meyer, an agricultural 
explorer of the Office of Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction of the 
United States Department of Agriculture. As had been expected, the 
fungus was found to be only weakly parasitic in that country, judging 
from Meyer’s letter, which is quoted here only in part: 
“The blight does not by far do as much damage to Chinese chestnut 
