coffee. The history of this malady is almost unique in vegetable pathology. A native fungus which had eluded scientific observation, and must therefore have maintained an inconspicuous and limited existence on some native host-plant, found a wider opportunity on the Arabian coffee plant and fell upon it as a devastating scourge. It was first detected in 1869 on a single estate; in 1873 there was probably none in the island entirely free from it. Mr (since Sir Daniel) Morris had shown that the plants could be cleansed by dusting them with a mixture of sulphur and lime. But the remedy proved of no avail as the plants speedily became re-infected. Morris had been transferred to another appointment in the West Indies and Ward's duty was to take up the investigation. This he accomplished exhaustively. He showed that the fungus (Hemileia vastatrix) was one of the Uredineae and that infection was produced by the wind-borne uredospores. Had the planters, as in Southern India, left forest belts between their plantations, the spores might have been filtered out and the disease controlled. As it was it spread like an unchecked conflagration. Ward also discovered the teleutospores; nothing has been added to our knowledge of its life-history beyond what he obtained. The result of his investigations was given in three official reports and in papers contributed in 1882 to the Linnean Society and the Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science. It was no blame to him that his work led to no practical result. The mischief admitted of no remedy. The coffee-planting industry of Ceylon was destroyed and the Oriental Bank succumbed in the general ruin. Leaf disease has now extended to every coffee-growing country in the Old World from Natal to Fiji.
In a tropical country leaves supply a substratum to a little flora of their own, consisting of organisms partly algal, partly fungal, in their affinity. Ward, who had already developed his characteristic habit of never neglecting any point incidental to a research, carefully studied them, in order both to ascertain how far their presence affected the health of the leaf itself and to work out their life-history. The outcome was three important papers. One on Meliola, an obscure genus of tropical epiphyllous fungi, belonging to the Pyrenomycetes, was published
