We have an urgent need in Australia to develop in situ remedial treatments for the present population of in-service transmission poles. For various reasons we have opted for formulations which can be applied as bandage treatments and thus we are primarily concerned with assaying diffusable toxicants. Two basic approaches have been made: an assay of the formulation's toxicity; and a combination assay of the formulation's diffusibility and toxicity. Of the direct assay methods the filter-paper technique is the more rapid although with highly soluble formulations some leaching of toxicants will occur during the preparatory stages and probably during incubation also. Furthermore, filter papers are not strictly comparable to wood, and a modification we have considered is to use 'papers' prepared from mechanically beaten pulps rather than chemically degraded pulps. An additional modification would be to substitute veneers for filter papers, although this may give rise to surface concentration effects since the veneers could prove difficult to impregnate homogeneously. By far the most valuable technique for our own screening programme of potential toxicants to control soft rot in standing poles is the Petri dish/wood slab technique. While agar diffusion systems are rapid and provide valuable 'short list' data, the information obtained on diffusion rates cannot easily be applied to solid wood. Da Costa's slab technique is obviously advantageous in this respect. Furthermore, it can be so tailored that successive inocula can be sequentially assessed, thereby providing added information on component diffusion as well as total formulation movement. However, care must be taken in interpreting the data since it is not possible to distinguish directly which chemicals in a mult-component formulation have diffused first and hence which are the toxic ones. Similarly, it could be necessary to impose a time restriction on the test with certain types of formulations.

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