REVIEWS. 
173 
REVIEWS.^ 
Disease in Plants. 
By H. marshall WARD. 
(Macmillan & Co., London, 7s. Cid.') 
Thou&h the title of this book is comprehensive enough for a much 
more bulky volume, yet its contents would perhaps be more correctly 
summed up as “ plants in health and disease.” 
Professor Ward has done much in England to advance the science of 
plant pathology and to encourage others in the pursuit, and his work in 
this field is of special interest in Ceylon, because his first scientific 
investigation of a disease and its causations was at Peradeniya. 
To the lay reader some of the book may be not easily understand- 
able, but if read carefully and intelligently by agriculturists and 
horticulturists, whether in temperate climates or the tropics, a great 
gain must result. They will be led to a clearer understanding of 
the complex problems which those who tend plants have to consider, if 
they would keep their charges in as productive a state as possible. 
To workers in the domain of plant pathology and therapeutics 
the book will be welcome as much for the suggestions as to lines 
of attack as for the record of positions already secured. It is to 
be hoped that this volume, summing up as it does in a brief form the 
main facts about plants in the abnormal states called disease, will 
be the precursor of a work dealing with therapeutic methods and 
results. 
There is a mass of knowledge on therapeutic points gradually being 
acquired in Germany, America, and other countries, which requires 
to be put through the mill of inductive reasoning and reduced to a 
series of general laws. Even in the present work a chapter might 
most usefully have been devoted to some methods of investigation, and 
a brief account given of one or more cases of the working out of 
the life history of disease-producing organisms, by De Bary, Hartig, 
or Tubeuf. Such examples of accurate tracing of causation by 
* The articles which appear under this head are written primarily for 
the Ceylon constituency of this Journal, and deal chiefly with advances in 
Science which are of immediate local interest. . i 
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