14 MORPHOLOGIC VARIATION 



as though the mere naming of them had somehow or other proved the 

 author's opinion as to their identity. 



This persistent naming of all the structures described with names 

 borrowed in part from mycology, in part from cytology, or as in the 

 case of Enderlein, coined for the occasion, only serves to obscure the 

 problem and to make it more difficult for the reader to follow the 

 author. One cannot help but suspect that the necessity for using 

 a new terminology has its origin in the obscurity of the thought 

 which the author is trying to express. The confusion introduced by 

 this terminology is all the greater because the same structures are 

 referred to by the various authors under different names, and the 

 same names are used to designate different structures. Thus the 

 lateral and terminal projections from cells are referred to by Hort 

 simply as buds, by Almquist as conidia, by Lohnis and Enderlein as 

 gonidia, by Mellon sometimes as conidia, sometimes as exospores. 

 Almquist speaks of a single bacterial cell of irregular or ameboid 

 form as a plasmodium, but states that this is identical with Lohnis' 

 symplasm; while Mellon applies the same term to the connecting 

 filaments of protoplasm described by Meyer under the name plas- 

 modesmids. Mellon refers to the globular structures arising in colon 

 bacilli as zygospores, but to illustrate their nature offers for compari- 

 son a picture of the ascospores of Endomyces; and in a footnote 

 implies that the two words have the same meaning. In fact, to 

 Mellon the terms chlamydospore, arthrospore, dauerzellen, gonidium, 

 and zygospore all apply to essentially the same sort of a process; "they 

 may be viewed as branches of the same reorganization tree." But 

 these terms have very distinct meanings in mycology, and refer to 

 structures physiologically as well as morphologically different, and 

 their confusion can only result from an imperfect knowledge of the 

 nature of the processes under consideration. 



There is another unwarranted assumption in the reasoning of 

 these various authors, namely that permanent variation is an evidence 

 of sexual reproduction, that all variants are hybrids. No matter 

 how well we may consider this to be established for higher organisms, 

 we are certainly not justified in accepting it for unicellular organisms 

 where non-sexual reproduction is common and where there is no 

 differentiation into somatic and germ cells. Jennings has shown that 



