General and local disease - General death owing to cutting-off supplies, etc. - Disease of organs - Tissue-diseases, e.g. timber-Root-diseases - Leaf diseases, etc. - Diseases of Respiratory, Assimilatory, and other organs - Physiological and Parasitic diseases - Pathology of the cell - Cuts - Cork - Callus - Irritation - Stimulation by protoplasm - Hypertrophy.

On going more deeply into the nature of those changes in plants which we term pathological or diseased, it seems evident that we must at the outset distinguish between various cases. A plant may be diseased as a whole because all or practically all its tissues are in a morbid or pathological condition, such as occurs when some fungus invades all the parts or organs - e.g. seedlings when completely infested by Pythium, or a unicellular Alga when invaded by a minute parasite; or it may die throughout, because some organ with functions essential to its life is seriously affected - e.g. the roots are rotten and cannot absorb water with dissolved minerals and pass it up to the shoot, or all the leaves are infested with a parasite and cannot supply the rest of the plant with organic food materials, in consequence of which parts not directly affected by any malady become starved, dried-up, or poisoned or otherwise injured by the results or products of disease elsewhere.

In a large number of cases, however, the disease is purely local, and never extends into the rest of the organs or tissues - eg. when an insect pierces a leaf at some minute point with its proboscis or its ovipositor, killing a few cells and irritating those around so that they grow and divide more rapidly than the rest of the leaf tissues and produce a swollen hump of tissue, or gall; or when a knife-cut wounds the cambium, which forthwith begins to cover up the dead cells with a similarly rapid growth of cells, the callus. Numerous minute spots due to fungi on leaves, cortex, etc., are further cases in point, the mycelium never extending far from the centre of infection.

Many attempts have been made to classify diseases on a basis which assumes the essential distinction of the above cases, and we read of diseases of the various organs-root-diseases, stem-diseases, leaf-diseases, and so forth; or of the various tissues-timber-diseases, diseases of the cambium, of the bark, of the parenchyma, and so on. Furthermore, attempts have been made to speak of general functional disease, of diseases of the respiratory organs, of the absorptive organs, and so forth, as opposed to local lesions.

Critical examination, however, shows that no such distinctions can be consistently maintained, partly because the organs and functions of plants are not so sharply marked off as they are in animals, the diseases of which have suggested the above classification, and partly because all disease originates in the cells and tissues, and it is a matter of detail only that in some cases - e.g. severe freezing or drought of seedlings, or when some ingredient is wanting in the soil - the diseased condition affects practically every cell alike from the first, while in others it spreads more or less rapidly from some one spot.

Even the distinction into physiological diseases versus parasitic diseases cannot be maintained from the standpoint of the nature of the disease itself. All disease is physiological in so far as it consists in disturbance of normal physiological function, for pathology is merely abnormal physiology, no matter how it is brought about. This is not saying that no importance is to be attached to the mode in which disease is incurred or induced: it is merely insisting on the truth that the disease itself consists in the living cell-substance - the protoplasm - not working normally as it does in health, and this, whether want of water, minerals, or organic food be the cause, or whether the presence of some poison or mechanical irritant be the disturbing agent, as also whether such want or irritation be due to some defect in soil or air, or to the ravages of a fungus or an insect.

This being understood I need not dwell on the common fallacy of confounding the fungus, insect, soil or other agent with the disease itself, or of making the same blunder in confusing symptoms with maladies. In this sense, wheat rust is not a disease: it is a symptom which betrays the presence of a disease-inducing fungus, the Rust fungus. Similarly, chlorosis is not a disease: it is a symptom of imperfect chlorophyll action, and the best proof of the truth of both statements is that in both cases the fundamental disease-action is the starvation of the cell-protoplasm of carbohydrates and other essential food matters - in the one case because the fungus steals the carbohydrates as fast as the leaves can make them, in the second because the leaf is unable to make them.

The foundation of a knowledge of disease in plants therefore centres in the understanding of the pathology of living cells.

If a suitable mass of living cells is neatly cut with a sharp razor the first perceptible change is one of colour: the white "flesh" of a potato or an apple, for instance, turns brown as the air enters the cut cells, and the microscope shows that this browning affects cell-walls and contents alike. The cut cells also die forthwith; and the oxygen of the air combining with some of their constituents forms the brown colouring matter which soaks into the cell-walls. The uninjured cells below them grow longer, pushing up the dead debris, and divide across by walls parallel to the plane of the wound, and so form series of tabular cells with thin walls, which also soon turn brown and die, the cell-walls meanwhile undergoing changes which convert them into cork. The living cells deeper down are now shut off from the outer world by a skin, of several layers, of cork-cells, which prevent the further free access of air or moisture. During the period of active cell-division which initiates the cork, the temperature of the growing cells rises: a sort of fever (wound-fever) is induced, evidently owing to the active respiration of the growing cells.