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 hardly anything suffered from the attacks of these fungi but the wheat.  The ‘alsi’, upon which it always first made its appearance, suffered something certainly, but not much, though the stems and leaves were covered with them.  The gram (Cicer arietinum) suffered still less—­indeed the grain in this plant often remained uninjured, while the stems and leaves were covered with the fungi, in the midst of fields of wheat that were entirely destroyed by ravages of the same kind.  None of the other pulses were injured, though situated in the same manner in the midst of the fields of wheat that were destroyed.