12 THE AMERICAN MONTHLY [Jan., 



will be able to puzzle it out ; "and when found make a 

 note of." 



In the past winter as well as during the present, I 

 have been seeing in the apples which I always keep in 

 some quantity in my special "den," a cottony, white 

 growth meandering over the inner surfaces of the horny 

 cells which enclose the seeds, and clustered in little 

 white patches on the surface of the seeds themselves. 

 The object is in no special variety of apple, but in almost 

 any kind, varying in abundance as also in its presence, 

 in a way that of course I do not understand. But the 

 growth, when it is present in any quantity , is conspic- 

 uous in elevated, fluffy ridges spreading in irregular 

 lines over the cell walls, and gluing the seeds to those 

 walls by its widening, or rather its thickening, increase. 

 vSo far as I have been able to learn, the growth does not 

 extend through the cells of the fruit, and therein is the 

 puzzle. 



How do those ■ vegetable threads, for that is what 

 they positively are — how do they get into the cells 

 which enclose the seeds ? Scrape off a little of the per- 

 fectly white and cottony object, mount it temporarily 

 in a drop of water, and it immediately reveals itself as 

 a cluster of those fungous threads called a mycelium, 

 where each consists of distinct cells, colorless, except 

 when scraped from the seeds, when the coloring matter 

 from them will usually be found to have tinged the ad- 

 herent mycelial cells, and having the surface attractively 

 ornamented by minute, colorless, papilliform elevations. 

 As far as I know these little papilla^ are characteristic of 

 this mycelium ; I do not recollect that I have ever seen 

 such appearances in any other growth of the kind, nor 

 that I have ever read of them. The threads not rarely 

 branch, and the colorless protoplasm within their cells is 

 often divided into little trabeculje formed by the inter- 

 lacing of minute protoplasmic filaments which demand 



