~ pb Ss 
epidermis ; the grapes remain small, and finally burst, the 
fleshy interior being ferced out of one or two intersecting 
clefts. 
The English gardener Tucker was the first to remark, in the year 
1845, the Fungus which was named after him, but without recognising 
its nature. The disease appeared at Versailles in 1850 ; and in 1851 
under various conditions, and in widely scattered districts, in France, 
Italy, and Germany. In Madeira, the vine, which had been cultivated 
since the fifteenth century, was attacked in 1852 ; in several succeeding 
years the crop completely failed; and this induced the inhabitants to 
abandon the cultivation of the grape for that of the more profitable 
Fic. 376.—The vine-mildew : A, the Fungus Oidium Tuckeri ; @ the cidium-spores 
(conidia) becoming detached; + the organs of attachment; 4 a germinating 
spore (xX 400). B, c the so-called cicinobulus-fruit [or cyst], a later form of 
fructification of the vine-mildew ; @ its spores. (x 450.) 
sugar-cane ; so that for twenty years after 1851 scarcely any Madeira 
wine was produced. From that time the disease, favoured by damp 
warm weather, has spread locally to the whole of Europe, no remedy 
having been up to the present time discovered for it. 
Next to the vine-disease the p/um-discase is one of the 
most destructive parasitic diseases of the different kinds of 
stone-fruit. The malformations produced by it, and known 
under the name of ‘ pods’ and ‘pockets,’ are distinguished 
from the dark juicy fruit covered with a bluish bloom by 
their greater length and flatness, by the want of the hard 
stone, and by their invariably lighter colour. The prema- 
- 
iS The Life of the Plant. ass 229 
li 
