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give him useful indications in every contingency which may arise. This is the end I have striven to obtain, and I shall be happy to have succeeded.

MANUAL FOR THE SULPHURING OF DISEASED VINES, AND RESULTS.

THE EMPLOYMENT OF SULPHUR, AND ITS EFFECTS.

The disease of the vine was for the first time observed during the year 1845, on some stocks grown on trellis in a hot-house at Margate, a sea-port in the southeast of England. It is, therefore, only thirteen years that its appearance has been well authenticated.

It is in vain that the researches of the learned have sought a description or a designation of that strange malady in the texts of ancient authors, especially in those of Theophrastus and Pliny.* The reading of those texts, on the contrary, shows that the authors treated only of particular ailments to which vines

* Theophrastus lived in Greece about three centuries before Christ. Pliny lived in Italy in the first century.

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1 I see, however, that Mr. Strong, in his work on the grape, claims to have found a description of the disease in the writings of Theophrastus, and an account of its nature in those of Felix Fontana, who wrote about a hundred years ago.

were subject in the climates they inhabited, or in analogous ones; for instance, the "charbon," which causes a general falling off of the blossom (described by MM. Esprit Fabre and Dunal under the name of anthraconose), and the scalding of the grapes by the burning heat of the August sun. Nothing authorizes us to infer that those authors wanted to describe the disease now causing so much injury in our vines. Researches in modern authors have been no less barren.

The characteristics of the vine-disease are so clearly and sharply definable, and every where present themselves with such a uniformity, that one could never mistake a description of it. Then, again, its ravages have been so great that it would in any age have fixed the attention of historians, of naturalists, and agriculturists. We should have found, then, in the authors of former centuries, positive records of a fact of such high importance, if it had presented itself. Thus we are authorized at the present time in considering the disease of the vine as a fact wholly new, whose obstinacy and extent call for the serious attention of agriculturists and naturalists.

Issuing from the hot-houses of England, the disease has little by little invaded the whole European Continent where the vine is cultivated, as well as

the basin of the Mediterranean and the isles of the ocean. It was in 1851 that its appearance was positively known in the Department of the Herault, and the greater part of the French and Italian shores of the Mediterranean. Since then it has not ceased to propagate itself and work the greatest ravages.

Spain and Portugal, invaded one or two years after the eastern vineyards of Southern France and of Italy, are to-day just as badly treated.

In 1856 the product of the French vines was generally bad. In the centre and the north there was, at the same time, a notable decrease of the disease, but in the south it again came forth with disastrous power.

In 1857 the disease was general in all the south; but, energetically combated with sulphur in a great number of localities, did not prove so disastrous as in the years preceding. The malady also continued to decrease in the centre and north under influences favorable to the vegetation and fructification of the vine. Possibly, then, the period of decrease in the disease, so desirable for vine-dressers, had arrived; but the experience of 1857 again too well demonstrated the superiority of the products of the sulphured vines, both in quantity and quality, for it to be yet prudent to leave the vines to themselves. The

persistence of the disease in vineyards where it has been the most efficiently combated is a fact at this day so well established, that we should continually be on our guard against it. The sure and practicable means which we possess of combating this disastrous scourge must still be called into use, and still continue to confer on vine-growing countries benefits whose value will augment with the increased care bestowed. Those means are, in their employment, based on the methodical application of sulphur in powder, to which we owe, up to the present time, the most undoubted success.

The idea of applying sulphur to the cure of the vine-disease is old; it dates almost from the appearance of the disease, for it was proposed by an English gardener of Leyton, Mr. Kyle, in 1846, and by Mr. Tucker, the first observer of the oïdium, who combined sulphur with lime; but it received then little attention.

It is in France that this application of sulphur has been really studied and propagated. Thus, in 1850, M. Gontier, the able gardener of Montrouge, near Paris, obtained from it, in his grape-houses and gardens, excellent effects, and devised the use of the bellows to administer it, after having first moistened the branches and grapes. It was this last method of

application on branches and grapes moistened beforehand that was practiced in some of the vineyards of the Bordelais and of the south as early as 1853, and particularly by Count Duchatel and Doctor Turrel in 1851 and 1852, but it was under conditions as yet too embarrassing and costly for application on a large scale.

In 1853 Mr. Rose Charmeux conceived the idea of scattering dry sulphur on the foliage and on the diseased fruit. This idea rendered the use of sulphur practicable in large vineyards. It was published for the first time, with a report on the decisive results obtained at Thomery on 300 acres of vines, by the Imperial Society of Horticulture of Paris, at the end of 1853, and subsequently by M. Rendu, Inspector General of Agriculture, in the beginning of 1854 (Report to the Minister of Agriculture). These documents, which received an immense publicity by being reproduced in all the journals, leave no uncertainty as to the value of dry-sulphuring vines. It was only after their publication that it was employed on the vines of the south in the year 1854.

But to obtain in every case, from the use of dry sulphur, sure and complete results, certain determinate conditions must be complied with, which had not by any means been sufficiently described. It was

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