Miscellaneous. 529 



. . On the Sphserobolus stellatus. 



By the Rev. H. H. Higgins, M.A. 



The author exhibited a drawing of this plant, in various stages of 

 development, the several processes of which the reverend gentleman 

 had had an opportunity of witnessing. He had found the plant, a 

 minute species of Fungus, in the neighbourhood of Huyton Quarry, 

 on the 20th of September. It was growing on the flat surface of* a 

 stump, near the ground. He took it home, with a portion of the 

 wood on which it was growing, and placed it on a bed of damp sand 

 covered with a glass shade. A cluster of similar plants soon sprang 

 up, and the mode of growth in a single specimen was this : — At first 

 appears a little patch of reticulated fibres, the centre of which becomes 

 elevated from beneath by the growth of the young plant, which at 

 length bursts through the web, and assumes the colour and size of a 

 grain of mustard-seed. Subsequently it becomes egg-shaped, and 

 attains a height of about a line. A star-like fissure now divides the 

 apex of the plant into five or six equal segments, which fall back hke 

 the petals of a flower, and discover the inner or lining membrane, 

 resembling a minute egg-cup, and containing a sporangium or ball of 

 spores. At the period of maturity, this inner membrane suddenly 

 turns itself inside out, with an audible snap, projecting the sporan- 

 gium to a distance of several inches. The inside of the glass shade 

 used as a cover for the plants became spotted with forty or fifty of 

 these sporangia, which had been ejected with such force as to flatten 

 them against the glass. 



A portion of the spore-pulp, under a high magnifier, exhibited in- 

 numerable minute particles, displaying with great activity the ordinary 

 Brownian movements. When the pulp was taken from an unripe 

 sporangium, there were also to be seen, by the aid of iodine and a 

 magnifier with very good power of definition, certain other bodies of 

 a linear or slender oblong shape, many times the size of the moving 

 particles, and quite pellucid. These appeared to be attacked and 

 entered by the particles ; but whether the linear bodies afterwards 

 became developed into perfect spores, the observer was not able to 

 ascertain. — Froc, Lit. and Phil. Soc. of Liverpool, Nov. 17, 1856. 



The Gi'ope Disease. 

 To the Editors of the Annals of Natural History/, 



Sheffield, Dec. 9, 1857. 

 Gentlemen, — Without at all questioning the influence of the 

 Oidium as a cause of the grape-blight, there can be little doubt that 

 in this, as in all similar epidemics, some predisposing cause will be 

 found, by which the vital energies of the organism affected (plant or 

 animal) are depressed, and a vantage-point is thus offered to the 

 disease. We know that if a vegetable be planted in soil totally de- 

 prived of some one of the necessary ingredients, it is unable to exist. 

 If, however, instead of the missing constituent, there be fgund some 



