•478 SUMMARY OF CURRENT RESEARCHES RELATING TO 



Fungi. 

 (By A. Loerain Smith, F.L.S.) 



Obituary Notice of W. A. Kellerman.* — "While on a scientific 

 expedition to Guatemala, the editor of the Journal of Mycology died 

 very suddenly from malarial fever. He had gone there for the fourth 

 time to collect material, and the trip was almost completed. Kellerman 

 was born in 1850 ; the latter years of his life he was Professor of Botany 

 in the Ohio State University. Every moment he could spare from class 

 and laboratory work was devoted to the collecting of plants and building 

 up herbaria. Since 1902 he had been the sole editor of the Journal. 

 He has been a devoted worker in the cause of Mycology. Nearly eleven 

 pages are occupied by a list of his publications in various branches of 

 botany, though chiefly on parasitic fungi. A portrait of Kellerman 

 forms the frontispiece. 



Development of Saprolegnia monoica.f — P.. Clausen found that 

 the researches of Davis and Trow on the cytology of the Saprolegniacege led 

 the authors to opposite results, and that these results were not in harmony 

 with those of more recent studies on Ascomycetes and Basidiomycetes. 

 He gives a sketch of previous work, and describes his own methods of 

 culture with ants' eggs as substratum, and of fixing, colouring, and em- 

 bedding. In this species both oogonia and antheridia are formed, the 

 latter arising from the stalk that bears the oogonia, though occasionally 

 they are borne on more distant hyphse. The oogonia are multinucleate 

 and full of plasma in the early stages. Later, degeneration sets in, and 

 there is only a thin layer of plasma and a few nuclei left. The nuclei 

 divide by mitosis simultaneously, and the oosphores are formed round 

 certain of the nuclei, each one being uninucleate and each nucleus 

 having at the beginning a centrosome. The antheridia pierce the mem- 

 brane of the oogonium, and either branch or remain simple ; they apply 

 themselves to the oosphere and a nucleus passes over which fuses with 

 the oosphere nucleus ; the older oospores are always uninucleate. The 

 small size of the nuclei made it impossible to count the chromosomes 

 exactly : he reckoned about 10 to 14, but it is certain that no reduction 

 took place, and Clausen was led to the conclusion that it did not occur 

 until germination of the oospore. In this respect it agrees with the 

 process observed in the zygote germination of Coleoclmte. 



Parasitic Laboulbenia.J — Edouard Chatton and Francois Picard 

 describe one of these fungi, Trenomyces histophorus g. et sp. n., cha- 

 racterised by its having advanced further on the way to parasitism than 

 any other member of the same order. The basal cell of the organism is 

 spherical ; it pierces by a tube the cuticle of the insect, and feeds on the 

 adipose tissue — without, however, seriously injuring the host. 



Erysiphacese of Japan. § — E. S. Salmon publishes a supplementary 

 paper based on a collection of examples on 120 different hosts sent to 



* Journ. Mycol., xiv. (1908) pp. 49-63. 

 ' f Festschrift. Deutsch. Bot. Gesell., xxvi. No. 5 (1908) pp. 144-61 (2 pis.). 

 % Comptes Rendus, cxlvi. (1908) pp. 201-3. 

 § Ann. Mycol., vi. (1908) pp. 1-16. 



