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v 
sion, strips him of his leafy honors, and sends its destructive virus to 
the very heart—the living tissue—of his life-giving tubers. It is at once 
as merciless as death, and implacable as the grave. We approach the 
stricken field, where the plant has labored with such generous activity, 
with feelings almost akin to sympathy. We arm ourselves with physio¬ 
logical facts, experimental proofs, hypothetical data, and propitious com¬ 
binations of matter, in order to combat the hostily arrayed elements, or 
the innate and hereditary discord; but the subtle enemy everywhere 
eludes our grasp. With all our incontestible data—the fruit of years 
of human experience—we can find no stable point from which to start 
and carry on a work of restoration. That beneficent labor still remains 
to be performed, not by the speculative consciousness of man, but by 
an inscrutable law of a high-enthroned and ever-unerring nature. 
In studying the habitudes of the disease, however, and marking its 
coincidences with those which have scourged the animal world, we must 
be satisfied that the ‘ end of the plant is not yetthat the disease will 
ultimately pass away, and leave the plant to the domain of vitality. 
The history of contagious epidemics shows most satisfactorily that no 
large volume of the atmosphere is ever at any one time seriously affected ; 
that even the morbific exhalations of plague, small-pox, cholera, &c., are 
soon rendered innocuous by the disinfectant agents that are constantly 
abroad in the air. It is such a perfect self-regulating, self-restorative 
medium, that it is impossible to maintain any theory of disease upon strict 
atmospheric principles without combining some local causes. The yellow 
fever in its late ravages in the South West, proved quite as severe in high, 
airy and dry positions like those of Hatches and Vicksburg; and on 
solid, sandy soils, exposed only to the purest sea breezes, like those at 
Mobile and Pensacola; as it did in the damp, low, swampy locality of 
Hew Orleans. For several days the deaths at Natches and Mobile ex¬ 
ceeded, in proportion to the resident population of those places, the mor¬ 
tality of any one day in Hew Orleans during the epidemic. These facts, 
with hundreds of others that might be named, are not only inconsistent 
with the theory which locates the origin of the disease in certain condi¬ 
tions of the atmosphere; but, also, to the theory of local origin. The 
potato rot does not appear to be a sequence to any particular states of the 
weather, or changes in the conditions of the atmosphere. It is sub- 
