1921] HELLER~BACTERIA - ! 393 
characters. One genus of yeasts, the Schizosaccharomyces, divide 
as do the bacteria. Apparently typhoid bacilli may either bud or 
divide by fission Hort (16). Upon this one character of budding, 
BERGSTRAND lays so much emphasis that he refuses to consider 
other characters, also morphological, which show similarity between 
the bacteria and other forms: ‘“‘To discuss further the eventual 
relationship of Cyanophyceae to bacteria does not seem necessary, 
because any such theory would appear false at the moment that it 
became clear that bacteria are more closely related to fungi, as 
I shall show.”’ It must be noted that, like MEvER, BERGSTRAND 
excludes from his bacterial group the higher bacteria which do not 
resemble the fungi as much as they do the algae. One would be 
equally justified in naming as bacteria all the chlorophyll-free rods 
except the branching and budding ones. BERGSTRAND defines the 
bacteria as Fungi Imperfecti. The Fungi Imperfecti are an entirely 
artificial group comprising fungi that have not developed sexual 
characters, those that have lost such characters, and those that 
have not been studied sufficiently to determine their true relation- 
ships. BERGSTRAND concludes that bacteria are to be regarded as 
Fungi Imperfecti that have developed through the reduction of 
higher forms, and not as lowly primordial organisms to be placed 
at the very beginning of the organic world. An example of his 
logic is as follows: ‘“‘Of course if one regards bacteria as Fungi 
Imperfecti one cannot accept the theory that the chromatin is 
spread diffusely in the cell body, because this assumes it would 
seem a much lower developmental stage.” 
It is not the intention of this paper to criticize workers for 
connecting bacteria with fungi because of morphologic relationships 
between the two groups. BERGSTRAND’s observations serve to 
strengthen the tie between the fungi and the bacteria, but the 
lightness with which he proposes the degeneracy of the latter forms 
from the former is a novel process to comparative biological reason- 
ing. The trend of evolution is rarely in the direction of degeneracy. 
Degeneracy occurs as a.consequence of a parasitic habit or because 
of abundant food supply. It is usually accompanied by vestigial 
traces of a former complexity. The characters which the bacteria 
and fungi have in common are not manifestly vestigial in the 
