BOTANICAL INVESTIGATIONS. 
SUMMARIZED BY 
Hee. SD rEWARY, 
During nine of the first thirteen years of its existence the Station 
had no Botanist, so-called. Nevertheless, considerable botanical 
work of one kind or another has been in progress throughout the 
entire history of the Station. Much botanical work has been done 
by the Horticultural Department. The Botanical Department, 
proper, has devoted most of its effort to the investigation of plant 
diseases and their treatment, largely because of the great demand 
for information along this line. Hence, the present article deals 
chiefly with plant diseases while other lines of botanical activity 
are discussed in the section on horticultural investigations. 
PENS IS EASES: 
Owing largely to the discovery of bordeaux mixture in France 
in 1885, the simultaneous founding of agricultural experiment 
stations throughout the United States and the organization of a 
Section of Vegetable Pathology in the United States Department of 
Agriculture, the past quarter century has been a period of great 
activity in the study of plant diseases, particularly in their control, 
in which field more real advance has been made, probably, than in 
all previous time. In this work the New York Agricultural Ex- 
periment Station has had its full share. For convenience, the 
Station investigations on plant diseases will be treated by host 
plants arranged alphabetically by their common names. 
APPLE. 
Since the apple stands first in importance among cultivated fruits 
in New York it is proper that the Station should give considerable 
attention to the investigation of apple diseases. The first such dis- 
ease studied was fire blight,’ which causes the new growth of apple 
* Bacillus amylovorus (Burr.) De Toni. 
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