VOL. tlX.] PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. 6l3 



the little animals themselves were scarcely visible, till the food they had eate 

 had discovered them. The satisfaction Mr. E. received from clearing up this 

 point led him into many other curious and interesting experiments. Mr. E. 

 looked carefully over Mr. Turbervill Needham's very ingenious memoir on thi 

 subject, vol.45, p. 6l5, of the Phil. Trans,, he means as to the experiments, 

 many of which succeeded with him, some not.* I own, says Mr. E. Ins reason- 



* The ingenious Mr. Needham supposes, those little transparent ramified filaments, and jointed 

 or coralloid bodies, which the microscope discovers to us on the surface of most animal and vege- 

 table infusions when they become putrid, to be zoophytes or branched animals : but to me they 

 appear, after a careful scrutiny with the best glasses, to be of that class of fungi called mucor or 

 mouldiness, many of which Michelius has figured, and Linnaeus has accurately described. Their 

 vegetation is so amazingly quick, that they may be perceived in the microscope, even to grow and 

 feed under the eye of the observer. Mr. Needham has pointed out one that is very remarkable for 

 its parts of fructification. This, he says, proceeded from an infusion of bruised wheat. 



Mr. E. has seen the same sjjecies arise from the body of a dead fly, which was become putrid b 

 lying floating for some time in a glass of water, where some flowers had been, in the month of 

 August, 1768. This species of mucor sends forth a mass of transparent filamentous roots, whence 

 arise hollow stems, that support little oblong-oval seed vessels with a hole on the top of each ; from 

 these he could plainly see minute globular seeds issue forth, in great abundance, with an elastic 

 force, and turn about in the water as if they were animated. Continuing to view them with some 

 attention, Mr. E. could just discover, that the putrid water, which sbrrounded them, was full of 

 the minutest animalcula, and that these little creatures began to attack the seeds of the mucor for 

 food, as he had observed before in the experiment on the seeds of the larger kind of fungi or mush- 

 rooms. This new motion continued the appearance of their being alive for some time longer : but 

 soon after many of them arose to the surface of the water, remaining there without motion ; and a 

 succession of them afterwards coming op, they united together in little thin masses, and floated to 

 the edge of the water, remaining there, quite inactive during the time of observation. As this 

 discovery had cleared up many doubts, which Mr. E. had conceived from reading Mr. Needham's 

 learned dissertation, he put into the same glass several other dead flies, by which means this species 

 of mucor was propagated so plentifully, as to give him an opportunity of frequently trying the same 

 experiment to his full satisfaction. 



Lastly, those jointed coralloid bodies, which Mr. Needham calls chaplets and pearl necklaces, 

 Mr. E, has seen frequently very distinctly. These appear not only on an infusion of bruised wheat, 

 when it becomes putrid, but on most other bodies, that throw up a viscid scum, and are in a state 

 of putrefaction. These then are evidently no more than the most common mucor, the seeds of 

 which are every where floating in the air; and bodies in this state afford them a proper and natural 

 soil to grow on. Pere they send downwards their fine transparent ramified roots into the moisture 

 which they float upon, and from the upper part of the scum their jointed coralloid branches rise 

 full of seed into little grove-like figures. When a small portion of these branches and seeds are 

 put into a drop of the same putrid water the scum floats upon, many of the millions of little ani- 

 malcula, with which it abounds, immediately seize them as food, and turn them about with a variety 

 of motions ; as in the experiment on the seeds of the common muiihrooms ; either singly or two or 

 three seeds connected together, answering exactly to Mr. Needham's description; but evidently 

 without any motion of their own, and consequently not animated. 



I am satisfied, says Mr. E. that Mr. Needham's observations have convinced him long before this, 

 that they must be vegetables : for my part, I own I have never seen a zoophyte extend its branches. 



