440 BOTANICAL GAZETTE [November 



United States. Three main groups are recognized: one with very few-flowered 

 spikes, growing on conifers, about equally divided between the United States 

 and the Mexican highlands, comprising 12 species; one with more numerous 

 flowers, growing on various angiosperms, comprising 11 United States and 18 

 Mexican species, also limited to the North; and one, differing from the second 

 in the constant presence of scales at the base of at least its lowermost mter- 

 nodes, containing 14 Mexican and 17 Central American species. The first 

 two groups are distinctly boreal and neither passes into the West Indies. The 

 third group is distinctly equatorial, disappears well below the boundary between 

 Mexico and the United States, and contains the exclusive representation of the 

 genus in South America and the Antilles, more than half of its species occurring 

 in this extralimital region. Except for two of these tropical species to which 

 a wide range is ascribed, none occurs over so large an area as the common 

 mistletoe of the eastern United States, which in distribution about coincides 

 with the bald cypress. 



A new aquatic fungus. — Allomyces arbuscula, a new generic type 

 of the Leptomitaceae, has been described by Butler, 29 who found the fungus 

 growing on dead flies in still water in Pusa and Poona, India. The individual 

 plants consist of a basal cell which is attached to the fly by means of rhizoids, 

 and at the apex branches more or less dichotomously to form a fan-shaped 

 body of a few short cells. These give off slender branches which terminate 

 either in zoosporangia or in sporangia containing a single thick-walled, brown 

 resting spore. After the formation of a terminal sporangium, the axis is 

 continued by a branch arising below the sporangium. Thus a sympodial 

 system is built up as in Phytophthora. The fungus is peculiar in having a 

 completely septate thallus, not usual among the Phycomycetes. The author 

 regards it as a near ally to Blastocladia on account of the peculiar partheno- 

 genetically developed oospores, which he suggests may have been derived from 

 the Monoblepharis type through loss of the motile sperms.— H. Hasselbring. 



A bee hive fungus.— Miss Beits* has described a new genus (Perky stis 

 alvei) of "bee-hive fungus," which grows on pollen stored in the combs of the 

 honey bee. The fungus is said to be "undoubtedly a normal inmate of the 

 healthy bee-hive, and is, so far as is known, confined to that habitat." — J. M. C. 



2 * Butler, E. J., On Allomyces, a new aquatic fungus. Ann. Botany 25:1023 

 io 35- figs. 8. 191 1. 



*° Betts, Annie D., A bee-hive fungus, Pericystis alvei, gen. et sp. nov. Ann. 

 Botany 26:795-799. p[ s . 75, 7 6. 1912. 



