18 MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS. 
planters have lost whole fields and others considerable parts of fields. 
Still others have harvested their tobacco green to save some part of it. 
The entire loss in 1908 in North Carolina is not known, but is esti- 
mated at upward of $100,000. 
In Florida the disease has also made great inroads in several places, 
causing serious losses for three or four years. In 1908, one man lost 
20 acres of tobacco under shade by reason of it. The same year a 
company lost nearly every plant on 12 acres of home-grown Sumatra 
under shade and also a considerable part of 95 acres of imported 
Sumatra, also grown under cover (cloth). On many of these fields 
tobacco has followed tobacco for a long series of years (eighteen years 
in one field). 
The worst feature of this disease is the fact that fields once infected 
remain infected indefinitely, or at least for many years, and are also use- 
less for growing any other plant of this family, e. g., potatoes, tomatoes, 
eggplants, or peppers. The disease is therefore a very serious one. If 
it continues at its present rate of progress, tobacco growing in the 
infected districts will become impossible within a few years, and if it 
should extend to all the tobacco-growing sections of the United States 
this industry would be destroyed. It is therefore of the utmost im- 
portance to keep it out of sections which are still free from it. To this 
end correct information respecting its nature should be disseminated 
as widely as possible. An ounce of prevention is worth tons of cure— 
and, moreover, @ cure is not in sight. Something may be done, how- 
ever, by good field hygiene to restrict its progress. 
BACTERIAL ORIGIN OF THE DISEASE. 
The writer no longer has any doubt as to the bacterial origin of this 
disease. On two or three occasions he has found Fusarium on tobacco 
stems affected by this disease, but not commonly, nor ever exclusively. 
Generally there were also a great many bacteria present in the stems 
occupied by the fungus. Once I have observed Fusarium to be a 
secondary infection—in one plant out of many inoculated with the 
bacterium some years ago. 
Almost all of the diseased tobacco plants examined by me from 
North Carolina and from Florida, a hundred or more, in several differ- 
ent years, were attacked by bacteria to the exclusion of fungi. Fusa- 
rium certainly was not present. Nothing here said, however, need be 
construed as a denial of the occurrence in this country of a Fusarium 
disease of tobacco, since it 1s very reasonable to suppose the existence 
of such a disease. There are many such diseases, as the writer was 
the first to point out. One occurs on the tomato and another on the 
potato. Why not one on tobacco? The evidence necessary to estab- 
lish such a contention, however, is yet to be procured. Meanwhile we 
may consider the Granville wilt as solely bacterial in its origin. 
141—II 
