8 INTRODUCTORY 



peared suddenly and passed to fruit on agar in a petri dish offers a 

 valuable suggestion for further research. 



With such a life-history as that thus briefly sketched, it is small 

 wonder that the taxonomic place of the slime-moulds is a matter of 

 uncertainty, not to say perplexity. So long as men studied the 

 ripened fruit, the sporangia and the spores, with the marvellous 

 capillitium, there seemed little difficulty; the myxomycetes were 

 fungi, related to the puff-balls, and in fact to be classed in the same 

 natural order. The synonymy of some of the more noticeable species 

 affords a very interesting epitome of the history of scientific thought in 

 this particular field of investigation. Thus the first described slime- 

 mould identifiable by its description is Lycogala epidendrum 

 (Buxbaum) Fries, the most puff-ball looking of the whole series. 

 Ray, in 1690, called thi^ Fungus coccineus. In 1718, Ruppinus de- 

 scribed the same thing as Lycoperdon sanguineum; Dillenius at about 

 the same time, as Bovista miniata; and it was not until 1729, that 

 Micheli so far appreciated the structure of the little puff-ball as to 

 give it a definite, independent, generic place and title, Lycogala 

 globosum . . . . , etc.^ 



But Micheli's light was too strong for his generation. As Fries, 

 one hundred years later quaintly says, . . . "immortalis Micheli 

 tam claram lucem accendit ut succesores proximi earn ne ferre qui- 

 dem potuerint." Notwithstanding Micheli's clear distinctions, he was 

 entirely disregarded, and our little Lycogala was dubbed Lycoperdon 

 and Mucor down to the end of the century; and so it was not till 

 1790 that Persoon comes around to the standpoint of Micheli and 

 writes Lycogala miniata. Fries himself, reviewing the labors of his 

 predecessors all, grouped the slime-moulds as a sub-order of the gas- 

 teromycetes and gave expression to his view of their nature and posi- 

 tion when he named the sub-order Myxogastres. In 1833, Link, 

 having more prominently in mind the minuteness of most of the 

 species collocated by Fries, and perceiving perhaps more clearly even 

 than the great mycologist the entire independence of the group, sug- 

 gested as a substitute for the sub-order Myxogastres, the order 

 Myxomycetes, slime-moulds. Link's decision passed unchallenged for 



1 The Plasmodium in this case chances to be red, scarlet, etc. 



