Makers of British Botany; a collection of biographies by living botanists
History
Makers of British Botany; a collection of biographies by living botanists
Botanists -- Great Britain -- Biography; Botany -- Great Britain -- History
It can hardly be doubted that the upshot of Ward's laborious
investigations has had a powerful influence in deciding the policy
of the future water supply of London. If we hear nothing now of
obtaining it from Wales, it is because we know that even polluted
flood-water if exposed in large reservoirs will rid itself of its
bacterial contamination, partly, as was known already, by subsidence,
but most effectually, as shown by Ward, by the destruction of its most
deleterious constituents by the direct action of sunlight.
In 1895, Ward was called to the Chair of Botany at Cambridge. He was
supported by a distinguished body of fellow-workers, and developed a
flourishing school, in which every branch of the science found its
scope. The University erected for it an institute which is probably the
best equipped in the country, and in March, 1904, I had the pleasure of
seeing Ward receive the King and Queen at its inauguration.
During the later years of Ward's life he returned to the study of the
Uredineae. The scourge of wheat perhaps from the dawn of agriculture
has been "Rust,"
"Ut mala culmos esset rubigo ... intereunt segetes";
and the loss inflicted by it throughout the world is probably not
calculable. But the history of the Ceylon coffee disease is only too
patent an instance of the injury a uredine can effect.
Eriksson, the most recent authority on the subject, had found himself
quite unable to account for sudden outbursts of rust which it did not
seem possible to attribute to the result of infection. In 1897 he
launched his celebrated theory of the Mycoplasm. He supposed that a
cereal subject to rust was permanently diseased and always had been;
that the protoplasm of the Uredo-parasite and of the cereal, though
discrete, were intermingled and were continuously propagated together;
but that while that of the latter was continuously active, that of the
former might be latent till called into activity by conditions which
favoured it. Ward discussed the theory in his British Association
address at Toronto, and was evidently a good deal impressed with it,
but nothing short of actual demonstration ever convinced him; and when
he proceeded to investigate the actual histological facts on which the
theory rested he promptly exploded it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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