Jan. 26,1924 
The Black-Bundle Disease of Corn 
189 
In the light of subsequent experience the consistent association of 
this organism with purple-leaf plants in 1919 was due no doubt to the 
fact that all the material was collected at one place, Bloomington, Ill., 
and that practically all of the purple plants produced there in that 
season were due to the effect of this organism. No such consistency 
of association was found during 1920 from material collected at the 
same place, but again in 1921 Cephalosporium acremonium was found 
to be present in a high percentage of isolations from plants of both 
dent and sweet corn 
having black vascular 
bundles. The group of 
symptoms under dis¬ 
cussion may occur to 
some extent without the 
presence of C. acre¬ 
monium. Only careful 
examinations and analy¬ 
ses can determine when 
this organism is respon¬ 
sible for these symptoms. 
It is also true that in¬ 
fections by this organ¬ 
ism may be quite general 
in corn without the 
presence of any of 
these symptoms to a 
marked extent, except 
the blackened fibrovas- 
cular bundles. 
THE ORGANISM 
Fig. 
-After Massee (33, p. 274, fig. 23 ) Cephalosporium acre¬ 
monium twining around a black mold. 
The genus Cephalo¬ 
sporium Corda (9, p. 11) 
is characterized by well- 
developed hyaline my¬ 
celium and slender un¬ 
branched conidiophores, 
the spores of which are 
borne singly at the apex 
but are pressed to the 
side by the next pro¬ 
duced and eventually form a head held together by mucilage. According 
to Buchanan (5) the genus Hyalopus Corda is differentiated from 
Cephalosporium solely' by the more abundant production of mucilage 
by the former and the resultant globular refractive head produced. He 
also concurs with Lindau’s (28 , p. 100-101) characterization of Hyalopus 
as a Cephalosporium grown in a moist atmosphere, and he also thinks it 
possible that Allantospora Wakk. is but a growth form of Cephalospo¬ 
rium. Massee (33, p ; 274, 292), (fig. 2), quoting from Grove ( i8) } distin¬ 
guishes Cephalosporium from Botryosporium by the creeping primary 
hyphae and by the absence of distinct conidiophores at the tips of the 
branchlets. It differs from Acremonium by having more than one spore 
borne at the end of each conidiophore. 
