The Teaching of Plant Diseases in the Grades 



William Gould Vinal 

 Given in the Seminar, Botany Department of Brown University 



As the history of parallel movements may throw light upon our 

 present problem it may be worth while, as well as interesting, to 

 briefly review old acquaintances. 



In searching the mouldy rolls of the past one finds that the fruit 

 of that forbidden tree furnish a frequent theme. As early as 

 1340 in the "Ayenbite of Inwyt," the title of a religious treatise by 

 a monk, appears the well known saying that ' ' a roted eppel amang 

 the holen, maketh rotie the yzounde." Shakespeare in the Mer- 

 chant of Venice (VI. iii, 102) mentions "a goodly apple rotten at 

 the heart" and in the Taming of the Shrew (I. i. 139) says : "Faith 

 (as you say) there's small choice in rotten apples." As these are 

 suggestive of the manner of mentioning plant diseases in the past 

 one must conclude that the purpose was not so much to teach the 

 disease of the plant as to teach human morals. 



The handing down of knowledge of moulds, blight, and rust has 

 been in the folk-lore stage and is so today in most cases. The 

 crediting of the failure of a crop to an east wind or some such force 

 is the method of the Australian native. The medicine lore of the 

 savage is but just disappearing along the fence row of the farmer 

 and remains with the untutored, yet a scientific knowledge of these 

 things is a practical necessity for a civilized community. 



One might expect that the history of the hygiene movement in 



the grades would be suggestive as to the possibilities in garden 



hygiene but such is not the case. A little research shows that we 



are only in the initial stages of teaching the child how to care for 



himself. "In 1900 only eight cities in American had any organized 



health work in schools" (U. S. Bureau of Education Bulletin, 19 13). 



The Greeks emphasized physical training and Locke and Rousseau 



preached it, but clean hands as a prevention of disease was unheard 



of at that time. It was not until 1885 that physiology and hygiene 



were made a compulsory study by the laws of Massachusetts, and 



that was one of the first states to make the subject a part of the 



curriculum. When human hygiene is so recent that it scarcely has 



a history it would not seem over encouraging for the study of plant 



diseases. 



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