Disease in Plants - The Original Classic Edition

This is a new and freshly published edition of this culturally important work by H. Marshall Ward, which is now, at last, again available to you.

Enjoy this classic work today. These selected paragraphs distill the contents and give you a quick look inside Disease in Plants:

Now, of course, I am aware that no short cut or royal road to science exists, and if a man is going to train up trees or other plants, he ought to know all about them in health and in sickness, in youth and in old age, and he ought to learn everything about the soil they grow in, the air that surrounds them, the enemies that beset them, and all the multifarious relations of these one to another; but when I look at my boy and reflect how much his nurse, his schoolmaster, his tutor, his doctor, and his parents ought to know successively [vii]and simultaneously about him in sickness and in health, and about his surroundings, etc., I begin to wonder whether there is not after all something to be said for the cultivators point of view.

...Boussingaults contributions to our knowledge of the composition of the dead plant cannot be over-estimated; but he did more than this, because he so clearly apprehended the necessity for asking his questions directly of the living plant, instead of deducing [6]from chemical principles what might be supposed to occur in it; and although future researches showed that even so careful an investigator solved a problem of first importance-viz. the question of the fixation of free nitrogen-the wrong way, it will be found that so far as he did go his conclusions were sound, and well calculated to inspire the confidence with which the world received them.

...Then came Schimpers discovery of starch-forming corpuscles, which, if supplied with sugar, are able to form starch-grains in the dark, as in tubers, etc., underground; and as subsequent researches have proved that the chlorophyll-corpuscles-which are morphologically the same as the starch-forming corpuscles and can be replaced by them-are also able to form starch-grains from sugar, as proved by the experiments of Boehm, Acton, Meyer, Laurent, [10]Bokorny, Saposchnikoff, and others, it soon became evident that nothing essential needed altering in Sachs view that starch is the first visible product of carbon-dioxide assimilation, only it became clearer that the starch-grains are built up by the protoplasm from glucose or some similar body, and represent so many packets of reserve materials put by for the present because not required for the immediate needs of the cell.

...In this process energy enters the chlorophyll-corpuscle in the form of the radiant energy of the sun, it is there directed in the mechanism of the protoplasm, so as to do work on the molecules of water and carbon-dioxide which have also been brought into the machinery; this it does, breaking asunder their stable structure into unstable bodies, which then re-combine in different ways to form a carbohydrate, such as starch, and this starch is temporarily stored as grains, while oxygen escapes.