SPHEZROPLEACER. 133 
“ The zoospores are of an elegant shape, but this is not more uniform 
than their size or colour. Usually they are globular or shortly cylin- 
drical bodies, from one 190th to one 150th of a line long, of a beautifal 
cinnabar or carmine red, and furnished at one of their ends with a small 
colourless bead bearing two long cilia. Some of them are larger, 
pyriform or fusiform, and the result probably of the undivided con- 
tents of a resting-spore. Some of the zoospores are two-coloured 
—red towards the beak, and green throughout the other part, or 
the two colours are variously disposed, the colourless bead or beak, 
and the two cilia are invariably very distinct. The zoospores exhibit 
a slow jerking movement during several hours. This movement 
is often interrupted for several hours, when the whirling suddenly 
recommences. When the zoospores break through the integumens 
within which they are formed, they are not enveloped in cellulose, but 
already during their period of activity they begin to invest them- 
selves with a thin elastic pellicle. At the time of their germination this 
envelope thickens and lengthens in the form of a spindle, the two ends 
soon tapering off into long tails, which even the enlarging body of the 
zoospore itself separates farther and farther apart. The contents of this 
germ-cell, at first homogeneous and finally granular, change during this 
first growth. What is left of the red oil is quickly transformed into 
chlorophyll, and the plantlet assumes a uniform green colour. Never. 
theless one may perceive from the beginning a number of vacuoles, or 
limpid, colonrless droplets, in the midst of the protoplasm with which 
they are filled, and between them the chlorophyll collects in rings more 
or less distinct from each other. Soon large grains of starch appear in 
these collections of green matter, so that the plantlet combines all the 
characteristics of an adult cellule of the Spheroplea, even before it has 
exceeded a 13th of a line in length. The terminal tails have been 
observed after the plantlet was more than half a line long. Growth 
takes place in the middle, by the successive division of the older rings. 
The contents of the adult threads presents the most beautiful appear- 
ances. It consists of acolourless protoplasm, a green chlorophyll, a 
watery liquid, and granules of starch; the whole so disposed that the 
liquid element forms large vacuoles in a row, like the pearls of a 
necklet, and the diameter of which is nearly as great as that of the thread 
itself. Often these vacuoles abut on each other, and seem to give birth 
to partitions. In the spaces between the pairs of vacuoles the green 
plasma and grains of starch crowd together, though the space is dis- 
jointed by the innumerable small vacuoles they throw off. 
“On approaching fructification the vacuoles multiply to such an 
extent as to give the endochrome the appearance of a frothy mass, in 
which the starch granules are irregularly scattered. Soon after the 
starch granules assemble in pairs or threes or larger numbers, and 
around these groups the green plasma becomes more plentiful, so thati 
in time they appear as so many equidistant cysts in the axis of the 
thread. The greater part of the vacuoles having gradually disappeared, 
the green clots assume a stellate appearance, connected by green 
mucous rays or filaments. Between these star-like clots large vacuoles 
are formed in pairs, which flatten so as to look like partitions, so that 
each thread seems to be divided into numerous compartments. 
“The green matter contained in these compartments then undergoes 
modifications, and the mucous rays are gradually resorbed, the chloro. 
phyll contracting meanwhile—sometimes to the right and sometimes to 
the left. Ina short time the colourless plasm collects around the chloro- 
phyll in such a manner that the partitions disappear, and the whole 
contents of the thread breaks up into a large number of free globular 
masses, easily distinguished from the ambient colourless mucilage, and 
containing acertain quantity of irregularly distributed chlorophyll. These 
