518 The Potato Disease. 
THE POTATO DISEASE. 
BY PROF. C. DEWEY. 
The disease and destruction of one of the great staples of food 
for man, is fitted to arouse attention and awaken interest. When 
that destruction secures the loss of a third or half of a crop, which 
has been relied on as the aliment of the laboring millions with 
their children, the demand of the cause and the remedy of the 
disease becomes loud and even oppressive to the feelings of 
humanity. 
This disease was first announced in England in 1845, and 
appeared, it is believed, about the same time in New England, 
and in the same or the succeeding year in the state of New York. 
It is said to have appeared fifteen years earlier in some parts of 
Germany, and to have extended itself so widely and fatally as to 
have attracted the attention of the government a little earlier than 
the year first mentioned. 
Various causes have been assigned to this disease. 
Some have maintained that worms, which eat in the stalk and 
descend toward the root devouring the interior part of the plant 
and poisoning its juices, are an adequate and the true source of 
the disease. That worms have often been found in the plants 
whose roots or tubers were attacked by the disease, there can not 
be a doubt. But whether they have been the cause or resulted 
from a specific disease, has not been ascertained, and seems not 
to be in a probable way of ascertainment. 
Others have attributed the disease to the soil, the wetness of 
the season, the manures, and all the related sources. Though a 
drier soil seems more exempt from its ravages, no such connection 
has been traced to any or all of these operations as is satisfactory. 
Trees and herbs die occasionally in the midst of their usual 
life without the influence of insects upon them, from a disease 
affecting primarily the leaves. 
A distinguished German philosopher tried to prove that it arose 
from an excessive development of the flowers of the Potato and 
the upper portions of the stalk, by which development the fertiliz- 
ing juices were prevented from descending, and the death of the 
plant at the root and the gangrene or mortification of the tubers 
were the result. The remedy proposed was the cutting ofiT of the 
upper branch when the stalk was near a foot high and again 
when new branches had appeared at a greater height. Some 
farmers in our country had already practiced cutting off the dis- 
eased tops, and were partially convinced that the disease was 
arrested by this operation. How improbable is this supposed 
