556 EHRENBERG ON THE ORIGIN OF ORGANIC MATTER 
systematic result of which I made known in the year 1818 in an inau- 
gural dissertation, under the title Sylve Mycologice Berolinenses, 1 
first discovered, in 1819, the real germination of the seeds of fungi and 
of mould, which has indeed been of late hypothetically received and 
described here and there, but of which the experiments and correct 
observations of the meritorious Florentine botanist, Micheli (1788), 
adduced in support of it, furnish no satisfactory proof. He saw, 
for instance, fungi grow where he had purposely sowed supposed 
seeds; but it is known that often fungi are found where no seeds have 
been purposely sown ; and it remained doubtful to every accurate natu- 
ralist, whether, notwithstanding the precautions related by Micheli, 
those fungi had really origmated from the so-called seeds which had 
been sown, or whether both the intended sowing and the origination of 
similar fungi coincided in time and place, solely because the conditions 
necessary to the generatio spontanea were promoted by it. The more 
important and influential the consequences were which might be sup- 
ported by these observations, the more necessary it was to submit them 
to rigid criticism. The complete investigation of the germination of 
single seeds and their growth could alone remove the doubt, which ne- 
cessarily increased with the general diffusion of the idea of a generatio 
spontanea, of the correctness of that observation ; and this nobody had 
made. I at that time followed up these ideas with more careful ob- 
servations than those of Micheli, and was so fortunate as not only to 
establish the fact, but also to discover the conditions under which the 
observation of the real germination of mould seeds may easily be re- 
peated at pleasure in every forty-eight hours. 
I made known these experiments in 1820, in a German notice in the 
Regensburger Flora, or Botanical Journal, part Il. page 535, and more 
completely in a Latin paper (De Mycetogenesi Epistola. Neesio ab 
Esenbeck seripsit Ehrenberg. Nova Acta Nat. Cur., vol. x.) addressed 
to the President of the Leopold’s Academy of Bonn. I have there given 
figures of the seeds of fungi, their germination and their gradual de- 
velopment, to the completion and formation of fresh seeds ; and the same 
experiments have been repeated by several others (see Fr. Nees Von 
Esenbeck in the Flora or Bot. Journal, 1820, page 531, and Schilling, 
in Kastner's Archiv, vol. x. p.429. 1827. The latter gives the obser- 
vation in 1827 as his own discovery). With this observation the ten- 
dence of the fungi and mould to a cyclical development was established, 
and the necessity of a generatio primitiva was removed as far from 
those as from other plants. These small bodies, which withdraw 
themselves from common view, entered into the series of the other 
greater natural bodies, so that the strangeness of their frequently enig- 
matical appearance may be referred to the requisite fineness of obser- 
vation, and the insurmountable difficulty of such observation in open 
nature, whilst a piece of rotten wood and a single rotten pear, &¢., as a 
