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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



color ; but soon they begin to grow darker, their contents shaping 

 into little round bodies, which when ripe are dark-colored and fill 

 the capsule to repletion. These little bodies thus produced in vast 

 numbers in the swollen ends of these vertical threads are termed 

 spores, and answer the same purpose for moulds that seeds do for flow- 



Fig. 2. 



ering plants. From the same base several of these capsules are pro- 

 duced, varying in age from threads with their tips little swollen, to 

 the tall and aged ones which have ripened and scattered their spores. 

 This mould has much the habit of the strawberry-plant, throwing out 

 runners or stolons, which take root and in turn become new plants to 

 increase and continue the species. In the culture we have often 6een 

 this mould hanging from the bread on the rack to the plate below, a 

 distance of four or five inches, with here and there the stolons with 

 their fruit-clusters hanging in mid-air (Fig. 1). 



The fruiting which has been described is asexual, and the spores 

 thus formed can be likened to the bulbs in the axils of the leaves of 

 the tiger-lily and other reproductive bodies in flowering plants which 

 do not result from a fertilized ovule. Several trials were made to cul- 

 tivate the sexual fruit of this plant, but without success ; another 

 member of the same genus (Mucor Syzygites), which grows on decaying 

 toadstools, produced them under the bell-jar in large quantities. When 

 this plant reaches the proper stage of development for the formation 

 of its sexual fruit, the tips of various filaments become noticeably swol- 

 len. Two of such enlarged ends grow toward each other and finally 

 meet by their extremities, or rather by the blending of the processes 

 which each cell puts out, thus forming at first a small cell between 

 the two united filaments. As maturity is reached, this zygospore ac- 



