New YorK AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENT STATION. 137 
apples that were left in were set on a plate and the spores on them 
blown about the room. One-half hour later 12 petri dishes of 
sterile potato agar were exposed for 3 minutes in the same way as 
was done before fumigation. 
A few days later an examination was made of all the plates. 
Those exposed before fumigation were completely filled with 
colonies of the blue mold. In the 12 plates exposed after fumiga- 
tion most of them were entirely sterile and in the others there were 
only a few scattered colonies, which very evidently came as a re- 
sult of contamination. See Plate VII. 
The results of these experiments indicate that the spores of the 
fungi that cause the most common decays of apples, whether on the 
decayed fruit or floating in the air, can be destroyed by sulphur 
fumes, using about I ounce of sulphur to 25 cubic feet of space. 
IV. APPLE INJURY BY SULPHUR FUMIGATION. 
In March, 1905, a box of injured Esopus Spitzenburg apples was 
received at this Station with a request to diagnose the trouble, if 
possible. The apples were grown and packed in the State of Wash- 
ington and shipped to New York where they were placed in cold 
storage. Upon being removed, some of the boxes of fruit showed 
_ the trouble while others from the same car were sound. 
The fruit was of the first grade and each apple wrapped in paper. 
The financial loss was important, as a considerable amount of high 
_ priced fruit had been ruined from a commercial standpoint. 
Scattered irregularly over the surface of each apple were con- 
spicuous spots of various sizes where the epidermis was dead, dis- 
colored and slightly sunken. Each spot was nearly circular, though 
on some apples the adjacent spots had coalesced, forming a large 
affected area of irregular shape. Beneath each spot to the depth of 
a few millimeters the flesh was dead, shrunken and dry, appearing 
as though affected with a dry rot. See Plate VIII, fig. 1. There 
was no disagreeable odor or taste to the dead flesh or epidermis. 
In the center of each of the smaller spots, and scattered over the 
larger affected areas, were small bodies resembling the pycnidia of a 
fungus, but examination showed them to be only the normal lenti- 
cels of the apples. Failure to find either fungi or bacteria as a 
cause of the injury led to the belief that some treatment of the 
fruit, such as fumigation, might be the cause. Sulphur, being com- 
monly used for fumigation, was experimented with to note the 
effect of the fumes upon ripe apples. Fruits of different varieties, 
