THE FAUNA AND FLORA OF OUR METALLIC MONEY. 335 



follicles and sebaceous glands of man as a favourite haunt. Of silk, 

 cotton, and wool, I saw threads of sometimes considerable length. 



This was all I could detect without further preparations. For a 

 better examination of the rest I dissolved some scrapings in ti watch- 

 glass of lukewarm sterilized water. After two hours the apparently 

 homogeneous substance was divided into a layer of fine sediment on the 

 bottom of the vessel, into free-moving particles, and a greyish layer on 

 the surface of the water. When I repeated this experiment and always 

 examined one portion after the other, the microscope showed the 

 following details. Floating on the surface there were bodies of chiefly 

 vegetable origin : stellate hairs of a plant belonging to the order of 

 SolanaceEe, glandular hairs of one of the Labiatse, sporangia without 

 spores of a fern belonging to the Polypodiacese, small particles of wood 

 of a dicotyledoneous stem, a tangential-longitudinal section of the stem 

 of a grass, macerated to such an extent as to be wholly transparent. 



The greatest portion of the surface material consisted of exceedingly 

 small particles of mostly organic origin, which were obviously in a 

 state of decomposition and did not give, therefore, any possibility of 

 identification. 



When I examined drop after drop, many of them disclosed micro- 

 scopical organisms of various colour, shape, and size. A strong 

 magnifying power showed globular cells, mostly isolated, but some- 

 times united into small groups. The bright green contents of the cells, 

 the presence of chromatophores, the small starch grains in the chroma- 

 tophores, which were visible in an iodine solution, of the size of 2 — 6 <", 

 and finally the comparison with the organism which I suspected to 

 be the same and which I had found on the outer surface of a flower-pot, 

 made it sure that the object in question was Pleurococwis vulgaris, 

 Menegh. In the same way I found another alga, a species of 

 Nitzschia Hassal, which belongs to the diatoms. The chromatophores 

 were completely reduced, wherefore it was one of the diatoms which 

 assume a saprophytic mode of life. Its size was 50 — 60 ^ in length. 

 In another case the field of view showed small globular and elliptic 

 cells, 6 fj. in length. Within a delicate membrane several small 

 vacuoles, sometimes a large one, could be recognized. A culture in 

 Pasteur's fluid enabled me to observe multiplication by budding. From 

 the circumstance that gemmation is peculiar to the saccharomycetes and 

 from other microscopical characters obtained by hardening and staining 



