VIII 

 BREAD MOLD 



BREAD MOLD is a most interesting plant to work with 

 and very easy to get. You do not need to hunt for it. 

 It comes to your bait like a hungry fish. Expose al- 

 most any kind of food and the mold spores floating 

 with the dust in the air settle on it and almost at 

 once start to grow and soon spread all over the food, 

 ruining it, of course, for human consumption. There 

 are many other kinds, however, we could hardly get 

 along without, like yeast to raise our bread, and the 

 forms that turn cider to vinegar and ferment our 

 wines. 



I started to work trying to picture bread mold, 

 knowing very little about it, which is a most ex- 

 cellent way of learning a good deal about it. A piece 

 of bread was the bait to bring it to hand and with- 

 out realizing what I have since found, that it is al- 

 ways necessary in picturing a life story of anything, 

 I was starting to carry it through all its stages of life. 

 I raised a great quantity of this fuzzy mold. It grew 

 wonderfully well in front of the camera or under 

 the microscope. I could watch all its stages of prog- 

 ress, growing very rapidly for a period, then resting 



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