MYCETOZOA. 131 



form of fasciculate clusters of cylindrical columns, others are steel 

 blue or copper-coloured iridescent balls on shining black stalks, 

 others again appear as a crowd of crimson clubs. Although they 

 are usually very minute, yet some species attain considerable 

 dimensions, as in the " Flowers of tan," so called from its frequency 

 in tanpits, which is often aggregated in large masses several inches 

 broad. The group had long been considered to belong to the 

 vegetable kingdom, and was placed with the Gasteromycetes in the 

 family of Fungi; but in 1858 the illustrious De Bary was con- 

 vinced by his own investigations and those of Cienkowski and 

 others that they possessed characters so analagous to those of 

 organisms universally recognised as animals that he introduced the 

 name of Mycetozoa or " fungoid animals," discarding that of 

 Myxomycetes or slime funguses as inappropriate. 



At this date the manner of germination of the spores of this 

 group was very imperfectly understood in this country. The spores 

 of fungi sprout by throwing out a branching filamentous growth, 

 such as we know in the various kinds of moulds, in mushroom 

 spawn, and only too well in the dry rot that destroys our timber, 

 and it was not suspected that the Mycetozoa differed from fungi in 

 this respect. Even in 1859 the careful observer Currey wrote 

 to the Journal of the Linnean Society that he had noticed the 

 spores of Cribraria (one of the group) to germinate by filaments, 

 which united with other similar threads. What he observed was 

 probably a mould fungus attacking the spores. But when we 

 remember that it was only in 1853 that Hugo von Mohl discovered 

 the properties, as far as they were then known, of the simple form 

 of living matter to which he gave the name of protoplasm, " the 

 first formative material," we are reminded how great has been 

 the advance of knowledge on these subjects during the last forty 

 years. 



The investigations, however, which were carried on in Germany 

 showed that the mode of germination of the spores of the 

 Mycetozoa was entirely different from what was observed in fungi. 

 It was found that when those spores are placed in water, the spore 



