190 Brand in the Cereals. [Nov., 



this microscopic process are so unsatisfactory. I shall repeat them 

 elsewhere after my own observations. 



According to my accurately made analysis, the fungus belongs 

 to the species Hymenula among the fleshy fungi, where also on 

 decaying remains of plants it has a multitude of associates, which 

 likewise greatly impair and destroy their mother plants and lodg- 

 ing places. The noxious quality of the fungus as well as its 

 medicinal use I take for granted to be already well known, and 

 will now pass over to the comparison of the appearances in the 

 liiseased and the sound seed, in order to sketch the injurious power 

 of this hardly visible parasite. 



If a thin section of a sound kernel of rye be made (Fig. 28), 

 we find that the seed skin (Fig. 28, a), consists of three thick 

 walled cellular layers, and beneath these we find the second seed 

 skin, properly the third, formed of a single layer of thick wall- 

 ed cells b, with scarcely any perceptible hollows. Directly 

 after this follow the cellular layer, containing gluten c, and now 

 first the cellular tissue of the albuminous substance d, which con- 

 sists of large, somewhat round, six-sided cells, containing grains 

 of starch meal (Fig. 26). The grains of starch meal themselves 

 are roundish or ellipsoidal (Fig. 30), and formed like all other 

 grains of starch meal; they are 0.000150 Paris inch in length, 

 and are thus nearly five times larger than the spores of the para- 

 site itself. 



But all these organic tissues are transformed, or as it may be 

 better expressed, entirely crowded out. The seed skins and cells 

 of gluten (Fig. 28, a, b, c) in the parasite, are only indicated by 

 the black layer (Fig. 25, c); the large cells (Fig. 28, d, Fig. 29) 

 of the albuminous substance together with their amylum have dis- 

 appeared, and are replaced by the cells of the bearer (Fig. 27) 

 nearly fifty times less in size. The amylum here, as the contents 

 of the cells, is replaced, as it were, by the little drops of oil con- 

 tained in the cells of the bearer. And as the organization of the 

 seed is wholly changed, so too are the organic etfects of the two 

 substances become ditFerent. The grain of rye was nutritious, 

 palatable, healthy; the spurred rye (Mutter korn) is in the high- 

 est degree noxious, poisonous, the means of producing raphanic, 

 insanity, and abortion; its medicinal usefulness is by no means a 

 counterbalance to the dangerous, poisonous effects, which it pro- 

 duces when introduced among human food. 



I conclude here the first course of investigations respecting the 

 diseased appearance of plants generally, and once more beg of the 

 respected reader to judge candidly and favorably of these desulto- 

 ry pages, and to receive the matters of fact related and illustrated 

 without any fanciful forms of knowledge, as the pure observations 

 of nature. Elsewhere when I shall consider these appearances 



