270 JETHAL1UM. PART n. 



It would be tedious to describe the variety of forms 

 assumed by the fruit-bearing bodies in the different 

 genera of these fungi, or the manner in which they are 

 ruptured to give egress to the spores, which differ in 

 colour according to the species, though they are for the 

 most part red. The forms of the chaffy scales and 

 threads are equally diversified : in the species of Trichia, 

 the threads contain one or more spiral filaments, a form 

 peculiar to the vegetable kingdom. 



Botanists are now generally of opinion that the 

 Myxogastres are vegetables, although the singular 

 Amoeba-like motions some of them exhibit, and the 

 nature of the motile bodies they produce, seemed to 

 assign them a place in the animal kingdom; indeed, 

 even now little is known of the reproduction and final 

 life-history of these singular fungi. 



Motions precisely similar to those of the Amoebae, the 

 lowest class of animal existences, were observed by MM. 

 Hoffmann and Tulasne, and more especially by M. de 

 Bary, 7 in the -ZEthalium septicum. It is a yellow pulpy 

 mass, produced upon a spawn or mycelium consisting 

 of semi-fluid gelatinous anastomosing filaments, often 

 widely spread through the moist tan in hothouses. 



M. de Bary describes the filaments of the mycelium 

 as full of a multitude of small colourless corpuscles 

 mixed with large yellow ones ; moreover the branches 

 of this mucous network are described as continually 

 changing their form, in a manner closely resembling 

 the pseudopodia of the animal Amoeba. They push out 

 new branches, 6thers are withdrawn, and the whole 

 mycelium frequently advances with a creeping motion 

 of translation. The yellow pulpy mass produced by 

 the mycelium is entirely composed of similarly con- 



7 ' Des Myxomycetes,' par M. Antoine de Bary ; et Memoires par MM. 

 Tulasne et Hermann Hoffman, 'Annales des Sciences Naturalles,' 4me 

 series. 



