194 RESEARCHES ON FUNGI 



Link, in his First Dissertation (1809), attributed for the first 

 time the projection of the sporangium to its true cause, namely the 

 tension of the swelUng below the sporangium. His words are : 

 " Explosio fieri mihi videtur, dum suprema pars stipitis bullata, 

 sporangium inferne ambiens, contrahitur." 



Relhan, in his Flora Cantabrigiensis (1820), maintained that 

 Pilobolus roridus was distinct from P. crystallinus ; but Purton, in 

 his Midland Flora (1821), recorded both of them under one name 

 Pilobolus urceolatus, giving detailed reasons from experiment to 

 show that they are not distinct, and accompanying his account 

 with " a very beautiful and accurate drawing " by his niece, " taken 

 from the fresh plant." 



In 1823 Ehrenberg pubhshed in Kunze u. Schmidt's Mykologische 

 Hefte an account of some observations he had made upon P. crys- 

 tallinus, in which, while searching for Otto Miiller's " worm," he 

 noticed a curious movement of yellowish particles arranged in a 

 snake-hke form in a drop of water which occupied the summit of 

 the sporangium. This, he thought, might be the " worm," because 

 it moved with a " slow, steady, circling motion " which excited 

 his wonder. 



All the authors mentioned so far correctly placed the genus in 

 the immediate vicinity of Mucor. Fries, however, in 1 823, considered 

 it as nearly alUed to Sphaerobolus and placed it in the Gasteromycetes 

 in the section CarpoboU, but in 1829 he discovered his mistake and 

 restored it again to the Mucorini. Nevertheless Berkeley, in Smith's 

 English Flora (1836), incautiously repeated Fries' error, and in 

 his Outhnes of British Fungology (1860), perhaps by reason of this 

 confusion, he omitted Pilobolus altogether. 



Up to this time only the two species already mentioned, called 

 P. crystallinus and P. roridus, were generally known, but in 1828 

 Montague had already described a third, to which he gave the name 

 of P. oedipus {cf. Fig. 104, p. 209) on account of the swollen basal 

 reservoir which is so conspicuous a feature in that species. He 

 repeated this in his Sylloge generum specierumque cryptogamarum 

 in 1856. 



In 1837 Corda instituted in his Icones Fungorum the group 

 Pilobohdae to contain Pilobolus and Chordostylum ; in 1842 he 



