THE BEGINNINGS OF LIFE. 341 



brought under the notice of the Scientific Committee of 

 the Royal Horticultural Society '. I found, on making 

 thin sections of the central tissue even of young shoots, 

 that many of the cells contained an abundance of 

 Bacteria^ and others a smaller number of Torula-like 

 corpuscles, whilst some of the surrounding cells were 

 quite free from either. I have since met with the same 

 kind of thing when examining the central portions 

 of decaying tubers and other fleshy parts of plants. 

 Actual mycelial growths are, moreover, to be found 

 in various situations, to which we might pretty con- 

 fidently suppose that no external germs could ever 

 have penetrated. They have been found, for instance, 

 in the liquid juice taken from freshly broken cocoa- 

 nuts 2 , from the interior of walnuts and filberts 3 , and 

 from the central portions of stone-fruits, such as plums 

 and peaches, whilst the surrounding and external fleshy 

 portions were quite uninjured and unaffected. Speaking 

 of Botrytis infest ans^ which he regards as c the proximate 

 cause of the potato murrain/ the Rev. M. J. Berkeley 

 says 4 : c The walls of the cavities of the carpels of 



1 An account of which is to be found in ' Journal of Royal Hortic. 

 Soc.' vol. iii. 1872, p. 14. 



2 Dr. Sigerson writes : ' The author of this paper, having opened the 

 dense shell of a cocoa-nut, and cut through its oily albumen, both per- 

 fectly intact to all seeming, found in the milk a web-like plant, a kind of 

 Achlya.' ('Monthly Microscopical Journal,' Aug. 1870, p. n.) 



3 The so-called Tricotbecium roseum, for instance. I have seen a 

 fungus-growth in the very centre of an otherwise healthy filbert. 



* 'Introduction to Cryptogamic Botany,' 1857, p. 65. 



