808 
AN INFECTION EXPERIMENT WITH FINGER 
AND TOE. 
The disease of finger and toe, which is met with wherever the turnip 
crop is cultivated, is probably nowhere more destructive than in the 
north of England. On certain classes of soil it is only by l im ing 
heavily every eight or ten years that turnips can be cultivated at 
all, and the expense involved in this treatment is felt to be almost a 
greater burden than agriculture, in its present condition, can bear. 
The desirability of devising some cheap means of mitigating or 
eradicating the disease, and so of rendering a heavy periodic dressing 
of lime unnecessary, is felt to be almost of national importance, and 
it was with the object of assisting in the solution of the problem that, 
in 1893, some experiments were started in the garden attached to 
this college. Most of the investigations are still incomplete, but 
the past season has furnished certain results which it is felt are 
Illustration (prepared from a photograpil) of the results of the Experiment. 
The six heaps of turnips in the upper row correspond with the six heaps in the lower row 
each plot having been treated in duplicate. The numbers count from right to left, No. I being 
below No. 1a, No. 2 below No. 2 ±, and so on. 
sufficiently conclusive and important to warrant their being brought 
to the notice of English farmers. 
In the spring of 1894 Mr. Pringle of Brantcn, at my request, 
supplied the college with two bags of soil taken from a field which 
had a bad reputation for finger and toe. Until it was required we 
were careful to keep this soil in the condition of what may be called 
natural moistness, for in the previous year we had found that soil 
became useless for purposes of infection if it was allowed to become 
over-dry. On May 22 a piece of suitable land having been made 
ready for the reception of the turnip seed, it was laid off in shallow 
drills 27 inches apart and 28 feet long. The fungicide or antiseptic 
employed to counteract the effects of the infected soil on certain of 
the plots was quicklime (CaO), that is to say freshly burned lime, 
but ground in a phosphate mill to such a degree of fineness that 
