(about 8,600 metric tons) lower than the previous peak year. Planters finally began to panic. They asked the colonial government to hire a scientist who would devote himself exclusively to studying the epidemic. The planter G. A. Talbot wrote that the planters needed “a scientific man to make what researches he can and to give us information from a scientific point of view, so as to help us carry on the experiments. From a practical point of view we know our business, but from a scientific point of view we can get valuable assistance, by investigations with the microscope for instance.”45 Talbot’s reference to a microscope is significant. Scientists had, of course, used microscopes to study the coffee rust since it was first reported in 1869. But the scientists who had done so—Berkeley and Broome, principally—lived and worked in England. Their research was important, but they didn’t work on living plant material and therefore could only see part of the fungus’s life cycle. Talbot was asking for a scientist who could bring the techniques of the laboratory—scientific instruments and experimental protocols—to study living coffee rust in the field.46 They expected, or hoped, that this innovative kind of fieldwork would uncover some means to control the disease.
The coffee rust outbreak had, in fact, coincided with important innovations in botanical research, known in the English-speaking world as the “new botany.” The new botany could equally well have been coined the “German botany” since the discipline was largely developed in German institutions (just as Liebig’s agricultural chemistry had been) and then taken by eager students to the rest of the world.47 Practitioners of the new botany emphasized the study of living plants, in contrast to traditional botany, whose practitioners usually worked with dried herbarium specimens. The new botany emphasized studying the life cycle of plants, both in the laboratory and in the field. The emergent discipline of phytopathology—the study of plant diseases—built on the methodologies and approaches of the new botany. In the 1840s and 1850s, German naturalist Anton de Bary conducted pioneering research on crop diseases, particularly on the potato blight and the rusts and smuts of wheat. Through meticulous research in the laboratory and the field, he reconstructed the entire life cycle of fungi, from spores to mature organisms. He cultivated spores in the laboratory and on plants, and he tried to reproduce disease by systematically inoculating healthy plants with fungal spores. He produced convincing evidence that the fungi were independent organisms, that they had a life cycle, and that they were the cause of plant diseases rather than the consequence. De Bary’s approach offered a new way of understanding the coffee rust.48
In 1879, Ceylon’s planters enlisted the colony’s government to hire a scientist to study the rust. William Thiselton-Dyer, the assistant director at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, recommended one of his former students, a young biologist named Daniel Morris. Thiselton-Dyer had previously trained Morris in the techniques of the new botany at the Normal School of Science in London. Morris had been in Ceylon since 1877 as an assistant at the Peradeniya Botanic Gardens. Using de Bary’s techniques, Morris carefully studied the rust in the field and reconstructed the fungus’s life history. He concluded that the rust had an external “filamentous” stage that lasted several months. He argued that attempts to control the fungus should focus on this external stage because the rust would be exposed and amenable to chemical control.49 Morris worked directly with the coffee farmers in ways that the other scientists at Peradeniya had never done. He enlisted the help of coffee planters to conduct experimental sprayings of working coffee farms in the Dimbula district using “some of the specifics that have proved so successful in the treatment of the hop and vine mildew.” The sprays included mixtures of sulfur, including black sulfur, flowers of sulfur, sulfur and coral lime, and Grison’s mixture (sulfur and slaked lime). Morris found that a “mixture of sulphur and lime dusted by hand onto the tree has been found, by experiment, to be the most suitable remedy,” at a cost of 16.5 rupees per acre for materials.50 Although the trials lasted just a single season, the preliminary results seemed to satisfy the planters.51
Morris’s decision to involve planters paid institutional and political dividends. Before his arrival, coffee planters had doubted whether botany had anything useful to offer them. Thwaites had not done any experimental work on the rust and had offered planters little hope. Morris quickly gained their support by enlisting them in his programs and offering them a compelling explanation for the disease and recommendations for control strategies. “Mr. Morris has been in this country for over a year, Dr. Thwaites more than thirty,” observed one coffee planter. “Who has told us the most about leaf disease?”52 Morris wrote that “there are plenty of good, practical, and hard-headed planters who have been convinced by the logic of facts and who intend to take up the cure most thoroughly.”53 The editors of The Gardeners’ Chronicle in England celebrated “the progress made in ten—we may say for all practical purposes, in three years. It is a justification for the existence of scientific committees, scientific lectures, and practical experiments, and we are heartily pleased to see that Ceylon planters fully appreciate the import of what has been done.”54
Just as Morris seemed to have established the value of agricultural research, he left his post. In mid-1879, the Colonial Office appointed him as the new director of the botanical garden in Jamaica, leaving the planters once again without the support of a scientist. At first, the island’s governor, Sir James Robert Longden, balked at hiring a replacement. He cited Morris’s success as a reason for not appointing a replacement. Morris, argued Longden, “had exhausted the history of the Hemileia.” The planters, he continued, “knew what they had to do and the mode of carrying it out.” That work “belonged to the practical planters rather than scientific men.”55
Even as some planters celebrated Morris’s achievements, others voiced caution. Morris himself had argued that the results of his experiments could only be confirmed after a full growing season. He had left for Jamaica before this, and over the remainder of the season, it became apparent that the chemical treatments Morris had recommended did not, in fact, control the rust. This did not destroy the planters’ newfound faith in science, though. Ceylon’s chamber of commerce requested that the home government appoint “another gentleman of possible equal qualifications and attainments to Mr. Morris.” The Colonial Office once again asked Thiselton-Dyer at Kew to recommend a suitable candidate. He recommended another young scientist named Harry Marshall Ward, who had studied natural science at Cambridge (where he graduated with a first-class degree in 1879) and Würzburg, where he had studied under Anton de Bary and Julius von Sachs, two leading proponents of the new botany. When he returned to the UK, he worked at the Jodrell Laboratory at the newly founded center for experimental plant biology at Kew.56 Thiselton-Dyer and Hooker recommended that Ward be sent to Ceylon on a two-year contract. This was enough time, they felt, for Ward to study coffee over several growing seasons. That would allow him to establish where Morris had gone wrong and—they hoped—to find an effective cure.
Ward brought the new botany to bear on solving the problems of the coffee rust. Over 1880 and 1881, he conducted a wide range of systematic and comparative observations and experiments aimed at understanding the fungus’s life cycle, its epidemiology, its impact on the coffee tree, and potential control measures. In these two years, he produced three important reports for the government of Ceylon detailing the experiments and his findings. He also produced two scientific papers for the Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science and the Journal of the Linnean Society. Although the reports are written in dry, official language, they nonetheless reveal Ward’s creativity and energy. He conducted meticulous microscopical studies on the life history of the fungus, isolating the spores and exploring how they germinated and developed through the living leaf tissue. He placed potted coffee trees around the veranda of his house so that he could observe how the disease developed on coffee plants with different exposures to the wind and rain. He hung glass slides from coffee trees to trap airborne rust spores; he deliberately infected coffee plants placed in Wardian cases. He carefully observed how rust epidemics developed in the field. He also partnered with several coffee growers to conduct experiments on chemical control. Few cultivated plants had been subjected to this kind of systematic field work, and certainly no other tropical crop had received this kind of attention. Ward’s experimental rigor
