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Chiswick plants the suckers were abundant. The same fungus is commonly 
described as having its threads without articulations or septa, but it is equally 
common to see the figures of this fungus with septa in profusion. 
Many botanists, as Corda, Bulliard, Klotzsch, and others, have considered 
the cystidium in Agaricus to correspond in some way with an antheridium, but 
as these views have not at present been favoured by Tulasne and De Bary, many 
botanists seem disposed to agree with De Bary in regarding the cystids as mere 
“pilose productions of a particular order,” which is very indefinite, and the 
granules as mere conidia (Tulasne). Klotzsch and others have considered it 
possible that the spores are fecundated by a lubricating fluid given out by the 
ceystidia. This fluid is evidently the same with the threads observed by me, and 
which at length gives birth to spermatozoids. I consider it quite possible that the 
mere contact of the threads (or fluid) from the cystidia with the threads from the 
unpierced spores may be sufficient for the production of a new plant. But 
De Bary, in criticising Klotzsch, says an opinion of this nature is entirely 
gratuitous,"and the contact and its result, if real, would represent nutrition rather 
than fecundation, and, as far as he knows, there exists, he says, no other 
observation on any female organ susceptible of fecundation by the cystidia. I 
cannot fall in with De (Bary’s views at all, especially after the analogy found in 
Fucus and in the confervoid pollen (which has no outer coat), and which exhibits 
rotation in the flowering plants found under Zostera, Phucagrostes, &c., and which 
are fecundated when in a state of immersion in water. 
As regards the spores of woody species of fungi, they are probably fertilised 
on the parent plant, and are blown away by the wind in a condition suitable to at 
once form the first cells of a new plant on any proper habitat. If Agarics were 
perennial and persistent, instead of being annual and fugitive, we might expect to 
see anew hymenium produced each year upon the lower surface of the old one, 
and this state of things really does exist in many species belonging to the perennial 
and persistent woody fungi of trees, where a new stratum of tubes is every year 
produced underneath the old one, so that the age of the fungus in years may be 
correctly ascertained by merely counting the strata. As to the mycelium itself, 
and the possibility of its producing sexual organs in Agaricus, I have had the 
subject before me for many years, and have seen many germinating spores, but no 
trace of any sexual organ other than the spermatozoids as produced from the 
cystidia themselves, or from the protoplasmic filaments which they throw out. 
I am therefore disposed to believe that the absence of sexual organs on the 
mycelium is owing to the threads being the produce of fertilisation. 
As for the expressed juice of horse-dung, it abounds with nematoid worms, 
spores and infusoria of many kinds—no drop can be examined from a dung-heap 
after a shower of rain without seeing large quantities of these organisms. 'There- 
fore any uncertain thread taken for examination from dung is sure to lead to error. 
All my experiments were carried out in duplicate, one with expressed juice, and 
the other with distilled water, with very little difference in result, as the new plant 
seemed to live principally on the remains of the old parent. - 
