1900] MacBride, — The slime moulds 77 
while, lost color, and finally everywhere transformed itself into a thou- 
sand tiny, sculptured, capitate sporangia, raised each upon a slender 
fibrous stem, each sporangium packed with abounding spores, in form 
and color characteristic of the species. Only in one particular were 
the spores abnormal; not a few were far too large. It would seem 
that in some cases the thin pellicle of cellulose which we call the cell- 
wall had enclosed, to form the spore, two nuclei instead of one as is 
the rule. Certainly the conditions of fruiting were, after all, not quite 
normal. Fruiting ensued before cell-division had had time in each 
case to become complete; hence the giant or double spores. Some 
of these spores, a few days later, were sown in water, placed in an 
incubating oven, where, in a few hours, they germinated by the simple 
breaking of the cell-wall, each giving rise to a tiny amceboid speck of 
protoplasm, motile, free. These, could they have found nutrition, 
would no doubt soon have greatly multiplied by simple cell-division, 
and gone on at length to form a new plasmodium like that with which 
we started. 
Such was our experience in the laboratory, correspondent, no doubt, 
in all essential particulars to that which occurs out of doors in all 
appropriate seasons of the year, and such is the life-history of the 
slime mould generally. 
But after all these were laboratory experiments, like nature, corres- 
pondent indeed, but still meagre and poor by comparison, as phy- 
siological laboratory experiments are pretty sure to be. To study 
slime moulds and know them we must go out of doors and be content 
to stay out of doors, for a day at a time sometimes. The laboratory 
may help us, to be sure, but the lack of it need not greatly hinder us. 
In moist and mossy woods, by perennial springs and streams these 
things are at their best. The Atlantic seaboard affords, therefore, the 
richest variety for this continent, the woods of Maine, and all New 
England, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, nor less the region farther south. 
Students in these localities have, accordingly, some advantages ; they 
have profusion and variety. 
In the latitude of New England the best time to begin these studies 
is perchance in June. The climate of Iowa, precipitation now aside, is 
perhaps not very different from that of Massachusetts. With us about 
the time the Mertensia shakes out its blossoms and the Polemonium is 
in fullest flower, on some fair day that breathes the earliest airs of 
summer, the student wandering in the woodland is sure to see, perhaps 
