446 Dr. W. Nylander on the Germination of 



LIX. — Notulce Lichenologicce. No. XXV. 

 By the Kev. W. A. Leighton, B.A., F.L.S. 



On the Germination of the Spores o/*Varicellaria*. 

 By Dr. W. Nylander. 



TULASNE and De Bary have already written concerning the 

 germination of the large-sized spores of Lichens, and have 

 seen slender filaments extruded gradually on all sides from 

 the walls of the spore, which filaments these celebrated authors 

 regard as the first hypothalline developments, or beginnings of 

 the thallus. 



I have also seen the spores of Varicellaria (which are 

 almost the largest-sized spores of all Lichens — see Nyl. Lich. 

 Scand. t. 1. f. 8), when placed in a humid atmosphere or co- 

 vered with water, to be similarly covered in a short time with 

 slender circumradiant filaments. But at the same time I have 

 seen other similar filaments to issue from the various adjacent 

 fragments of the disrupted apothecium of Varicellaria. After 

 a month's time, in some spores, these filaments (both those of 

 the spores and of the other fragments) manifestly acquired a 

 mucedinous character, and produced moniliform, hyaline, peni- 

 cillate acrospores, and thus constituted a slender PeniciUium, 

 Afterwards, by continued culture, I have seen this PeniciUium 

 destroyed and vanishing away. But long before that, and 

 contemporaneously with the protrusion of the filaments above 

 mentioned, I have observed in the endospore a hyaline proto- 

 plasm, turbid in the middle, composed of very minute white 

 granulations, which, as it were by coagulation, formed a solid 

 white corpuscle (opake as seen against the light) in the cavity 

 of each cell of the spore — and that this afterwards gradually 

 increased after the fashion of an embryo, and at length in the 

 third month filled the entire cavities of both cells of the endo- 

 spore. At the same time the wall of the two cells showed the 

 concentric strata to have become sensibly looser, and was 

 fissured by frequent fine transverse rimulse (or strigulse) 

 (which same thing De Bary has observed, and which I myself 

 have noted in Pertusaria velata^ in Lich. N. Zeal., in Linn. 

 Soc. Journ. ix. p. 253), preparing for its future dissolution, 

 which a parasitic mucedinous vegetation would also promote. 

 From the middle of the month of March to the middle of the 

 month of June I have noticed these phenomena. The spores, 

 then denuded of the filaments of the PeniciUium (whose vege- 

 tation had passed away) displayed in the interior of each cell 



* Translated from <■ Flora/ Sept. 10, 1868. 



