446 Dr. W. Nylander on the Germination of 
LIX.—Notule Lichenologice. No. XXV. 
By the Rev. W. A. Lercuton, B.A., F.L.S. 
On the Germination of the Spores of Varicellaria*. 
By Dr. W. Nylander. 
TULASNE and De Bary have already written concerning the 
germination of the large-sized spores of Lichens, and have 
seen slender filaments extruded gradually on all sides from 
the walls of the spore, which filaments these celebrated authors 
regard as the first hypothalline developments, or beginnings of 
the thallus. 
I have also seen the spores of Varicellarta (which are 
almost the largest-sized spores of all Lichens—see Nyl. Lich. 
Scand. t. 1. f. 8), when placed in a humid atmosphere or co- 
vered with water, to be similarly covered in a short time with 
slender circumradiant filaments. But at the same time I have 
seen other similar filaments to issue from the various adjacent 
fragments of the disrupted apothecium of Varicellaria. After 
a month’s time, in some spores, these filaments (both those of 
the spores and of the other fragments) manifestly acquired a 
mucedinous character, and produced moniliform, hyaline, peni- 
cillate acrospores, and thus constituted a slender Penicillium. 
Afterwards, by continued culture, I have seen this Penicilliwm 
destroyed and vanishing away. But long before that, and 
contemporaneously with the protrusion of the filaments above 
mentioned, I have observed in the endospore a hyaline proto- 
plasm, turbid in the middle, composed of very minute white 
granulations, which, as it were by coagulation, formed a solid 
white corpuscle (opake as seen against the light) in the cavity 
of each cell of the spore—and that this afterwards gradually 
increased after the fashion of an embryo, and at length in the 
third month filled the entire cavities of both cells of the endo- 
spore. At the same time the wall of the two cells showed the 
concentric strata to have become sensibly looser, and was 
fissured by frequent fine transverse rimule (or strigule) 
(which same thing De Bary has observed, and which I myself 
have noted in Pertusaria velata, in Lich. N. Zeal., in Linn. 
Soc. Journ. ix. p. 253), preparing for its future dissolution, 
which a parasitic mucedinous vegetation would also promote. 
From the middle of the month of March to the middle of the 
month of June I have noticed these phenomena. The spores, 
then denuded of the filaments of the Penicillium (whose vege- 
tation had passed away) displayed in the interior of each cell 
* Translated from ‘ Flora,’ Sept. 10, 1868. 
