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 had been ascertained in fact that the rust fungus is not, as was
at first supposed, a single organism, but comprises, according to
Eriksson, thirteen distinct species, each with physiological varieties,
and that those which are destructive to some grasses and cereals, are
incapable of attacking others. This necessitated a scrutiny of the
nature of grass-immunity. In a paper communicated to the Cambridge
Philosophical Society in 1902, Ward announced a conclusion which was as
important as it was unexpected. He had more and more made use of the
graphical method for presenting to the eye at a glance the result of a
mass of separate observations. In this case he uses it with striking
effect. He shows conclusively, as far as rust in brome-grasses is
concerned, that: "The capacity for infection, or for resistance to
infection, is independent of the anatomical structure of the leaf, and
must depend on some other internal factor or factors in the plant."
Finally, he is led to the conclusion that "it is in the domain of
the invisible biological properties of the living cell that we must
expect the phenomena to reside." He pointed out the probability that
light would be thrown on this from the action of chemotaxis, on the
one hand, and from that of toxins and antitoxins in animal organisms
on the other. This is a most fertile conception, which would, however,
have required a good deal of verification, and this, unhappily, he
did not live to attempt. But with characteristic ingenuity he pointed
out the analogy between the infective capacity of uredospores and
the prepotency of pollen, which had previously engaged the attention
of Darwin. In a paper published in the following year in the Berlin
_Annales Mycologici_, he announced a no less significant result. With
his usual thoroughness in research he had cultivated side by side at
Cambridge more than two hundred species and varieties of Bromus,
and had watched the degree to which they were infected by rust under
identical conditions. He found that though in the brome-grasses the
rust peculiar to them is specifically identical its _forms_ are highly
specialised. The form which attacks the species of one group will not
attack those of another. Host and parasite are mutually "attuned." He
termed this "adaptive parasitism." This raised the problem, which had
first occurred to him in Ceylon, of how a parasite adapted to species
of "one circle of alliance" can pass to those of another. Occasionally
it happens that a uredo-form will infect a species where it ordinarily
fails. In such a case "its uredospore progeny will thenceforth readily
infect that species." Ward regarded this as a case of education.
Working on this principle, he succeeded by growing the parasite
_successively_ on a series of allied species which were imperfectly
resistant, to ultimately educate it to attack a species hitherto
immune. He called these "_bridgeing species_." He established, in fact,
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