Rhodora 
JOURNAL OF 
THE NEW ENGLAND BOTANICAL CLUB 
Vol. 2 April, 1900 No. 16 
3 THE SLIME MOULDS. 
'THoMAs H. MACBRIDE. 
(Plate 16.) 
IN view of the many points of curious and biologic interest attach- 
ing to the Slime Moulds, it is remarkable that they have not been 
more widely collected and studied in this country. They are ubiqui- 
tous ; they grow in field and forest, in orchard and garden, about every 
farm, nor less in every hamlet, in town and in city, in our hot-houses 
in winter, in our flower-beds in summer. In fact, wherever anything 
else can grow, especially anything of the mould or fungus kind, there 
slime moulds, at one time or another, are sure to be found. ‘True, the 
smallness of their fructifications removes them somewhat from ordinary 
discovery, but some of them are large enough, and nearly all of them 
make up in the number of their sporangia what may be lacking in size, 
so that, on the whole, slime moulds are certainly not less conspicuous 
than other small forms of fungal life. 
Besides, they possess in most of their species, in both color and 
structure, a certain curious elegance that makes them very attractive to 
every one who has the slightest sense of artistic delicacy and beauty. 
But far beyond all this lies the interest attaching to these forms as 
living things. In their life-history they are unlike anything with which 
we elsewhere have to do. ‘They are like moulds in that they use as 
food organic materials; they are unlike moulds in that they are desti- 
tute of hyphae, and in their vegetative phase present simply a mass of 
slime, apparently without organization, without form, without structure 
of any kind ; and yet living, moving, intact, cellular, multinuclear, and 
in growth and development evincing all the complexity of mitotic cell- 
division. They live as naked protoplasm, protoplasm in its “mineral 
