86 N. H. OCWDRY. 



a term which indicates a compromise, and is perhaps preferable. 

 We may enumerate briefly their many points of resemblance to 

 members of the animal kingdom. It has already been mentioned 

 that the plasmodium behaves to all intents and purposes like a 

 gigantic amoeba. It moves freely from place to place, burrows 

 deeply in rotten wood and into the substrata when it is necessary 

 to obtain nutriment, and, most significant of all, it is capable 

 of phagocytosis. That is to say, -it can actively devour and digest 

 bacteria and other foreign bodies which it is able to engulf. In 

 the total absence of chlorophyll, the green pigment so character- 

 istic of plants generally, and the accompanying saprophytic 

 behavior, they resemble the fungi, bacteria and other saprophytic 

 plants, on the one hand; and the whole animal kingdom on the 

 other, with but few exceptions. Following a study of the feeding 

 habits of Badhamia Elliott 5 looks on Mycetozoa as parasites, 

 more animal than vegetable. The swarm cells with their flagella 

 and food vacuoles, their motility and power to multiply by fission 

 call to mind the Flagellata. 



To these points of similarity to animals may now be added the 

 mitochondria, which I have found to occur in all the species of 

 Myxomycetes which I have examined, numbering ten or more. 

 The mitochondria observed are identical, so far as can be as- 

 certained, with the mitochondria in the higher plants and in 

 the whole animal series from the protozoa to man. The 

 point is, that in some lower plants, the mitochondria are 

 apparently totally absent or else quite different from those 

 which I have described in the Myxomycetes. They have not 

 been described in the Cyanophyceae ; in the bacteria their pres- 

 ence is doubtful (E. V. Cowdry 'i6a, p. 433), and in the Chloro- 

 phyceae they have been found in but few forms: Guilliermond 

 ('13, p. 86) thinks that here the enlarged chloroplast takes over 

 their function. So that the mitochondria of the Myxomycetes 

 approximate far more closely to the mitochondria of animals than 

 to those of the lowest plants. 



The discovery of mitochondria in the Myxomycetes extends 

 our knowledge of the extraordinary breadth of distribution of 

 these granulations in living matter. I have already shown 

 ('17, p. 225) that, so far as our present methods of technique go', 



