1 Jury, 1899.] QUEENSLAND AGRICULTURAL JOURNAL. 63 
probable we have isolated cases of it every year. The disease you describe 
seems to be very similar to one attacking the tomato in various parts of the 
country, and known here under the name of ‘Southern Tomato Blight,’” zn. lité. 
18-7-1894. barb 3 
In the spring of 1895, the Assistant Pathologist (Dr. Erwin F. Smith) in the 
department so ably presided over by Professor Galloway—prompted, it may be, 
by the writer’s discovery, with whom also he had been in communication— 
commenced an extensive series of microscopic examinations and plant inocula- 
tions in the laboratories and greenhouses of the U.S. Department of Agriculture 
in Washington, made field observations in August, 1895, and resumed. his 
laboratory investigations in the following year. As the outcome of this extended 
research, he published an important paper entitled ‘“‘ A Bacterial Disease of the - 
Tomato, Egg Plant, and Irish Potato (Bacillus solanacearum u.sp.),” as Bulletin 
12, Div. of Veg. Phys. and Path., U.S. Dep. of Agr. Dec. 1896. 
In a foot-note at the commencement of his memoir, Erwin F. Smith 
writes :—‘“ A. bacterial disease of potatoes and tomatoes has also been reported 
by Henry Tryon from Queensland, where it is said to be very destructive.” He 
then gives references to the summarised version of the report already alluded to, 
and adds:—‘‘In the article on ‘Gumming of Cane,’* the potato and tomato 
organism is called Bacillus vascularum solani, and no description is given, and I 
have not been able to find any, or to decide from the brief account of symptoms 
whether or not the Australian disease is identical with our own.” To this it may 
be added that, having carefully studied the statements in E. M. Smith’s able 
memoir pertaining to the American disease, and repeated some of the experi- 
ments that relate to the morphological and physiological characteristics of the 
bacillus referred to therein, and that go more fully into this aspect of the subject 
than had previously been attempted here, the conclusion—previously suggested 
by Professor Galloway—that the American and Australian diseases are identical 
is fully borne out, a verdict that any investigator, endowed with but little less of 
the spirit of scientific caution exercised by E. M. Smith, might have pronounced. 
even in the meagre light of the information, derived from this Queensland 
source, that partially illuminated the question. 
* The paragraph alluded to occurs on page 14 (‘‘ Gumming of Cane,” Department of Agri- 
culture, Brisbane, June, 1895), and is as follows :—‘‘I may also add that, in a new potato disease that 
Thave lately reported upon, and which I have had an opportunity for reinvestigating in the course of 
this inquiry, microbes, scarcely distinguishable from those that are met with in diseased sugar-cane, 
* -and which I have designated Bacillus vascularum solani (the microbe occasioning ‘gumming’ of. 
sugar-cane having already been entitled Bacillus vascularum by N. A. Cobb), occurs under pre- 
cisely the same circumstances—i.¢e., clogging up the vessels of the stems, roots, and rhizomes, 
and, in the initial stages of the disease, nowhere else; and that seedling examples of another — 
solanaceous plant, viz., the tomato—raised in soil in which these microbes have been liberated—~ — 
develop a disease apparently quite similar to that which the potato plants, from ;which they, 
have been derived, present, and which, amongst other features of resemblance that it shares, has 
these identical microbes clogging up its vessels also. So that the connection between the microbes 
and the occurrence of the disease with which they are associated in both plants is that fof cause’ 
and effect. 
Plant Pests. 
VAGINULA SLUGS. 
[Vaginula Hedleyi and. V. Leydigz.) 
By HENRY TRYON, Entomologist 
(Prat CXTX.) fi a 
INTRODUCTORY. 
Somes fourteen years since the writer commonly remarked the presence of a large 
and peculiar slug in the Brisbane Botanical Gardens, which was then to be found 
as it traversed the footpaths, early in the day during the summer months, especially 
