NOTES ON SOUTH NIGERIAN MYCETOZOA 123 



Harmattan becomes the White Man's burden, the earth has 

 yielded her increase to those who made their demands on her, and 

 has ah'eady in the proper season yielded the usual two crops of 

 maize besides abundance of yams and cassava. 



The greater part of the land at Ibadan must have been under 

 cultivation at one time or another, but much of it when taken 

 over by the Agricultural Department was under low scrubby bush, 

 having been fallowed according to the usual native custom of 

 allowing the land to revert to bush after about seven years' 

 continuous cropping. Moor Plantation, in common with the 

 whole of the Ibadan district, is plentifully sprinkled with Oil 

 Palms {Elceis guineeiisis Jacq.). As they yielded food the natives 

 held them sacred, and they were preserved when the rest of the 

 bush was destroyed. Very striking they look on the cleared land, 

 some of them seventy or eighty feet high, a great sight as they 

 bend and sway under force of the tornadoes. 



It happened that just before the wet season of 1913 a large 

 number of oil palms had been cut down in clearing the land for 

 the experimental plots. These were rolled away to be disposed of 

 by fire when the dry season came round again. Some of them 

 found a resting place in moist shaded places by the side of small 

 streams. The richness of the palm myxo-flora is rather remark- 

 able. Some of the species occurred on living palms at the 

 bases of the dead outer leaves and dead mala and female inflor- 

 escences, as I saw by examination of newly felled trees. Hemi- 

 trichia Serpula is frequently found on the queer mass of debris 

 that collects at the base of the crown at sixty to eighty feet from 

 the ground ; Physarella oblonga seems to prefer the dead female 

 inflorescence, P. reniforme the male. When the palm is felled 

 under suitable conditions a great variety of species appear. The 

 female .inflorescence, or what remains of it after the nuts have 

 fallen out, is a very bulky object, but on an evening in the wet 

 season I have seen the greater part of the surface of one of them 

 covered with the bright orange (palm-oil coloured, in fact), Plasmo- 

 dium of Physarella oblonga, which is perhaps the most striking of 

 all the Plasmodia that I have seen here ; its sporangia are from 

 their remarkable shape even more striking. 



Myxo-collecting is in my case purely a spare-time occupation. 

 The Nigerian evening is rather short, and as most plasmodia 

 seem to emerge at this time, I have had very little opportunity 

 to study them. Sporing is generally completed by morning. 

 One of the most active of plasmodia is that of Stemonitis her- 

 batica which I have once or twice brought in only to find in 

 the morning that it had crawled on to the metal surface of the 

 vasculum, and there formed sporangia. On several occasions 

 I have found it useful to take advantage of this activity in 

 order to secure good gatherings of forms whose plasmodia 

 emerge from the soil. It is hopeless to try to send sporangia 

 on soil through the post, unless they happen to occur on sun- 

 baked worm-casts. Having found a plasmodium emerging from 

 the soil in the evening, I have frequently laid "traps" for the 



