SECOND PART. 

 MYCETOZOA. 



CHAP. VIII. MORPHOLOGY AND COURSE OF DEVELOPMENT. 



THE name Mycetozoa is here applied to a group of Fungus-like organisms 

 amounting at the present time to nearly three hundred species, the larger number of 

 which are contained in the division Myxomycetes or Slime-Fungi (the Myxogasteres 

 of Fries) together with the smaller one distinguished by Van Tieghem under the name 

 of Acrasieae. 



The resemblance of the Mycetozoa to the Fungi is due partly to their mode of 

 life and nutrition, partly to the .close agreement in structure and biological characters 

 between their organs of reproduction and the spores of Fungi. A spore-terminology 

 corresponding to that of the Fungi will therefore be applied to the present group. 

 With this word of preliminary direction we now proceed to a more particular 

 examination of the group. 



MYXOMYCETES. 



SECTION CXVIII. The ripe spore of the Myxomycetes is round and ellipsoidal 

 with the structure of a simple Fungus-spore (see Figs. 182, 183, 193). An episporium 

 colourless or coloured, smooth or marked by characteristic surface-sculpture and 

 varying in thickness in each species, incloses a dense and homogeneous turbid 

 protoplasm, which contains one, or sometimes in abnormally large specimens, two 

 nuclei in the shape of round transparent bodies with a small central less transparent 

 nucleolus. Other bodies of definite shape are sometimes but rarely inclosed in the 

 protoplasm ; these have not been very closely examined, but are usually spoken of as 

 oil-drops or lumps of mucilage. 



The spores are capable of germination as soon as they are ripe in most of the 

 species in which this point has been examined; the moment of maturity will be 

 described more exactly in section 120. It is only in the Cribrarieae and Tubulinae 

 that all attempts to procure the germination of the spores have hitherto been 



