GASTEROM YCETES 



517 



in the course of development and consequently in the stage of Fig. 336, 1 

 are recognizable as such only in the apical end of the egg. 



This tissue I reaches its greatest development in Dictyophora; here 

 it develops to a beautiful structure (E. Fischer, 1887, 1890, 1891, 1900, 

 1910; Moeller, 1895; Burt, 1897; Atkinson, 1911). It is chambered, like 

 the receptacle, and follows the inner side of the pileus from the top to the 

 base of the egg (Fig. 335, 2). When the stipe elongates at the unfolding 

 of the fructification, the layer I, together with the pileus and the gleba 

 lying on it, is raised. Then the folded chamber walls elongate in this 

 layer, as did the receptacle stipe (Fig. 337, 2), and the layer/ expands 

 like a crinoline toward the bottom and unfolds to a latticed indusium. 

 This indusium is only an appendage of the receptacle stipe and, in con- 

 trast to the pileus, is not directly connected with the gleba. It is formed 

 when the gleba is just beginning to form and its ends are still far removed 

 from the stipe. Its significance is not yet clear. 



Fig. 338. — Section of hypothetical transitional form between Aseroe and the Phallaceae. 

 2. Diagram of young fructification of Phallus. Letters as in Fig. 332. (After E. Fischer, 

 1910.) 



A majority of the Clathraceae and Phallaceae are entomochorous and 

 by their strong odors attract attention from a distance. The fructifications 

 generally unfold at night and at dawn, the gleba has mostly dropped off. 



As Lohwag (1924) has demonstrated, in this grouping the Phallaceae 

 would be regarded as derivatives of the Clathraceae. In both families 

 the organization is fundamentally the same, only in the former the tramal 

 plates grow centripetally, in the latter centrifugally. If one imagines 

 that the development which leads from Protubera, Clathrella, Anthurus 

 through Aseroe arachnoidea to Aseroe rubra, continues, and that the 

 widening of the central strand S (Fig. 330, 7), appearing above the stipe 

 orifice, is more strongly developed and arched over slightly with the edge 

 in the shape of a bell, and that the splits between the branches of the 

 columella and thereby the plates of the intermediate tissue and the 

 receptacle branches (which in Aseroe rubra have been already alienated 

 from their original function) progressively degenerate and finally disappear, 

 one arrives at a form like that represented schematically in Fig. 338, 1. 

 Its longitudinal section is like that of Aseroe rubra, but the receptacle 



