556 EHRENBERG ON THE ORIGIN OF ORGANIC MATTER 



systematic result of which I made Icnown in the year 1818 in an inau- 

 gural dissertation, under the title Sylvce Mycohgicce Berolinenscs, I 

 first discovered, in 1819, the real germination of the seeds of fungi and 

 of mould, which has indeed been of late hypothetically received and 

 described here and there, but of which the experiments and correct 

 observations of the meritorious Florentine botanist, Micheli (1788), 

 adduced in support of it, furnish no satisfactory proof. He saw, 

 for instance, fungi grow where he had purposely sowed supposed 

 seeds ; but it is known that often fungi are found where no seeds have 

 been purposely sown ; and it remained doubtful to every accurate natu- 

 ralist, whether, notwithstanding the precautions related by Micheli, 

 those fungi had really originated from the so-called seeds which had 

 been sown, or whether Ijoth the intended sowing and the origination of 

 similar fungi coincided in time and place, solely because the conditions 

 necessary to the generatio spontanea were promoted by it. The more 

 important and influential the consequences were which might be sup- 

 ported by tliese observations, the more necessaiy it was to submit them 

 to rigid criticism. The complete investigation of the germination of 

 single seeds and their growth could alone remove the doubt, which ne- 

 cessarily increased with the general diffusion of the idea of a generatio 

 spontanea, of the correctness of that observation ; and this nobody had 

 made. I at that time followed up these ideas with more careful ob- 

 servations than those of Micheli, and was so fortunate as not only to 

 establish the fact, but also to discover the conditions under which the 

 observation of the real germination of mould seeds may easily be re- 

 peated at pleasure in every forty-eight hours. 



I made known these experiments in 1820, in a German notice in the 

 Regensburger Flora, or Botanical Journal, part II. page 535, and more 

 completely in a Latin paper {De Mycetogenesi Epistola. Neesio ab 

 Esenbeck scripsit Ehrenherg. Nova Ada Nat. Cur., vol. x.) addressed 

 to the President of the Leopold's Academy of Bonn. I have there given 

 figures of the seeds of fungi, their germination and their gradual de- 

 velopment, to the completion and formation of fresh seeds ; and the same 

 experiments have been repeated by several others (see Fr. Nees Von 

 Esenbeck in t\\e Flora or Bot. Journal, 1820, page 531, and Schilling, 

 in Kastner's Archiv, vol. x. p. 429. 1827. The latter gives the obser- 

 vation in 1827 as his own discovery). With this observation the ten- 

 dcnce of the fungi and mould to a cyclical development was established, 

 and the necessity of a generatio primitiva was removed as far from 

 those as from other plants. These small bodies, which withdraw 

 themselves from common view, entered into the series of the other 

 greater natural bodies, so that the strangeness of their frequently enig- 

 matical appearance may be referred to the requisite fineness of obser- 

 vation, and the insurmountable difficulty of such observation in open 

 nature, whilst a piece of rotten wood and a single rotten pear, &c., as a 



