New YorK AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENT STATION. 85 
the end of 24 hours showed a fairly abundant growth repre- 
senting a number of hundred germs. Between the third and 
the seventh day the material in the test tube became cloudy and 
the plates showed the presence of very large numbers of 
Ps. radicicola. This rapid multiplication may seem surprising, 
but Rogers'® has found that under favorable conditions in 
pasteurized milk, approximately 1,000,000 germs are produced 
from a single germ in three days. 
GENERAL OBSERVATIONS. 
There is nothing in this bulletin which should be construed as 
opposed to the idea of inoculating legumes with Ps. radicicola. 
This publication concerns itself solely with the quality of the 
cotton cultures which have been used the present season. 
Failure has followed each of our attempts to develop cultures 
of Ps. radicicola from the commercial cotton cultures. These 
failures could not well be ascribed to the laboratory methods 
employed by us, since the same method was uniformly successful 
when laboratory cultures of Ps. radicicola were used in the place 
of cotton cultures. 
The results of our colleagues reached in widely separated 
laboratories strongly support our findings. 
The explanation for this surprising condition of the cotton lies 
in the inability of Ps. radicicola under ordinary atmospheric 
conditions to maintain itself upon the cotton for any considerable 
time. rk 
The use of unsterile water, chemicals and utensils at the farm 
together with the contamination already present on the cotton 
exposes the few surviving Ps. radicicola to a fierce struggle for 
existence. 
The results with the commercial cotton do not show neces- 
sarily that all the Ps, radicicola were dead. They merely show 
that the germs were so few as to make no observable headway 
against the competition of the other germs present. 
Rogers, L. A. Bacteria of Pasteurized and Unpasteurized Milk under 
Labaratory Conditions. Bureau of Animal Industry, Bul. 73:25. 1905. 
