Agricultural Bacteriology e-bog

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. The organisms considered in agricultural bacteriology are specifically the most numerous, chemically the most active, and economically the most important known. This being true, why is so much interest shown in the injurious and so little in the beneficial bacteria? There are two chief reasons for this condition. When an outlaw commits some crime against human society it is heralded far and near and the machinery of the law is set in operation to apprehend the culprit and bring him to justice. So it is with these outlaws in bacterial society. The typhoid, or perchance some other disease-producing organism, attacks some individual, or it may be an entire community. If it be typhoid, we hear of the long - drawn out fight between the human individual on the one hand and the invisible enemy on the other. If disease be not checked it spreads to other places, and, as in the Dark Ages, sweeps like a prairie-fire over a whole continent or, as recently, over the entire world. The second reason why we hear more of the disease-producing organisms than we do of the beneficial bacteria is that man has learned that it is afight between him and these microbes to determine which shall inherit the earth. He has learned that he must protect him self against these enemies. For these reasons man has studied the bacterial outlaw, his place and condition of growth. On the other hand, though we admire the magnificent structures and complex institutions which have been reared by the mind and hand of men, we see and pass on. In many cases we do not stop to contemplate the countless millions, living and dead, who have contributed their mite that things might be as they are. Man does not have to protect himself against these honest toilers; hence, they go unnoticed. The work of the benefactor lacks the sensationalism which is attached to that of the destroyer. So it is with the count less billions of beneficial bacteria; they toil on day and night, generation after generation, accomplishing