xxx.] BUNT OF WHEAT. 251 



of the young wheat plant by entering the first-formed 

 organs of transpiration in the infant plant. The spores 

 themselves do not, of course, enter the stomata, and the 

 germ-tubes probably do not attack the rootlets unless the 

 latter are broken or injured, although it has been said 

 by Le Maout and Decaisne, in their General System of 

 Botany, that the spores can pierce the tissues of the 

 roots. The germ -tube, when once within the infant 

 plant, speedily ascends the stem. It is now by no 

 means difficult to trace the course of the mycelium up 

 the shaft of the affected plant, and an instance has been 

 recorded by the Rev. M. J. Berkeley in vol. ii. of the 

 Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society, 1847, where a 

 streak of bunt appeared upon the outside of the stem of a 

 wheat plant. Mr. Berkeley was the first to publish a 

 description and illustration of germinating bunt spores, 

 with the conjugating spores borne on the germ-thread. 

 This was seven years before the publication of L. E. 

 Tulasne's memoir in the Annales des Sciences Naturelles, 

 Botanique, series iv., vol. i., 1854. Mr. Berkeley, 

 although at first inclined to look upon these conjoined 

 bodies as having something to do with the reproduction of 

 bunt the appearances seen in some Algce indicating this to 

 him abandoned this first and correct opinion for the idea 

 that the conjugated bodies were parasites of bunt. He 

 described the growth as a Fusisporium, partly owing to 

 the septate spores, under the name of F. inosculans. It is 

 curious that Tulasne illustrated the conjoined spores of 

 germinating bunt as non-septate, and therefore unlike a 

 Fusisporium, and since 1854 this view appears to have 

 been generally accepted as correct ; but last year Dr. Oscar 

 Brefeld, in his elaborate work, Botanische Untersuclmn- 

 cjen uber Hefenpilze, correctly illustrate the germinating 

 secondary spores as furnished with septa, sometimes three 

 and sometimes four, precisely in the style of Fusisporium. 

 This observation, the correctness of which we are able to 

 confirm, proves the accuracy of Mr. Berkeley's observa- 



