others,
which have been exposed to the depredations of these parasitic
plants.

Every pore, it is said, may contain from twenty to forty of these
plants, and each plant may shed a hundred seeds,[4] so that a single
shrub, infected with the disease, may disseminate it over the face of
a whole district; for, in the warm month of March, when the wheat is
attaining maturity, these plants ripen and shed their seeds in a
week, and consequently increase with enormous rapidity, when they
find plants with their pores open ready to receive and nourish them.
I went over a rich sheet of wheat cultivation in the district of
Jubbulpore in January, 1836, which appeared to me devoted to
inevitable destruction. It was intersected by slips and fields of
'alsi', which the cultivators often sow along the borders of their
wheat-fields, which are exposed to the road, to prevent trespass.[5]
All this 'alsi' had become of a beautiful light orange colour from
these fungi; and the cultivators, who had had every field destroyed
the year before by the same plant, surrounded my tent in despair,
imploring me to tell them of some remedy. I knew of none; but, as the
'alsi' is not a very valuable plant, I recommended them, as their
only chance, to pull it all up by the roots, and fling it into large
tanks that were everywhere to be found. They did so, and no 'alsi'
was _intentionally_ left in the district, for, like drowning men
catching at a straw, they caught everywhere at the little gleam of
hope that my suggestion seemed to offer. Not a field of wheat was
that season injured in the district of Jubbulpore; but I was soon
satisfied that my suggestion had had nothing whatever to do with
their escape, for not a single stalk of the wheat was, I believe,
affected; while _some_ stalks of the affected 'alsi' must have been
left by accident. Besides, in several of the adjoining districts,
where the 'alsi' remained in the ground, the wheat escaped. I found
that, about the time when the blight usually attacks the wheat,
westerly winds prevailed, and that it never blew from the east for
many hours together. The common belief among the natives was that the
prevalence of an east wind was necessary to give full effect to the
attack of this disease, though they none of them pretended to know
anything of its _modus operandi_--indeed they considered the blight
to be a demon, which was to be driven off only by prayers and
sacrifices.

It is worthy of remark that