Word: funguses
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...potato came to Europe from the New World in the 16th Century. Its parasitic fungus followed about 1840, attacked almost every potato plant in Europe. Worst outbreak was in Ireland, whose wretched peasantry was already starving because of another parasite, the English landlord. Between 1845 and 1860, in the greatest disaster since the Napoleonic Wars, 1,000,000 Irish died directly because of potato fungus, and 1,500,000 emigrated. English industrialists used the Irish famine as a pretext to repeal the Corn Laws (which limited food imports). This, says Chemist Large, was "perhaps the most significant single event...
...botanists then believed that the potato blight was caused by fungi, which were thought to grow only on dead things, never on living plants. But when the fungus was at last proved guilty, botanists opened their eyes wide. They found fungi...
...Cryptogamic-i.e., devious in sexual behavior. As late as 1875 many scientists argued that some fungi were of spontaneous generation. So tiny and evasive were the winter spores of the potato fungus that they were not identified until 1910. Further, reproduction among fungi was usually sexless, with a sexual union occurring perhaps only once in several generations...
...Polymorphous-i.e., varying radically in form from season to season (like insects which are now egg, now worm, now butterfly). Plants once classed as unrelated proved to be variant forms of one species. And as a fungus changed form, it often changed the host it preyed upon...
With this baffling enemy sized up, intelligent defense could begin. The rust, a fungus which destroyed 300,000,000 bushels of wheat in North America in 1916, was proved to pass part of its life cycle on barberry bushes. So, within twelve years, some 18,500,000 of these bushes were destroyed in the U. S. alone. Wild currants were eradicated because they nourished a blister-fungus of U. S. white pine...