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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



cases, to produce a new slime-mold in 

 all respects comparable to its polymor- 

 phic ancestry, a new motile organism 

 ready once more to break up into spores 

 and fruit, and so continue its never-end- 

 ing cycle of purposeless existence. I say 

 purposeless, for there seems to be no 

 outlet, no outlook toward anything bet- 

 ter or higher. Its relations look back- 

 ward, not forward, and we connect it 

 with the lowest forms of animal life 

 more easily than with anything else. 

 Hence the difficulty of the systematist. 

 Animals they can hardly be, for no- 

 where else in the kingdom are animals 

 reproduced by spores, to say nothing of 

 the forms of fruiting described later on. 

 We call them for convenience fungi ; 

 yet, while some fungi are destitute of 

 mycelium, and some produce swarm 

 spores or motile naked amoeboid spores, 

 still in no instance do these behave as 

 in the slime-mold. 



It is interesting to notice the gin- 

 gerly manner in which naturalists in 

 their discussions approach these forms. 

 Sachs throws in a chapter, nowhere 

 in particular, a sort of addendum on 

 Myxomycetes. De Bary, the lamented, 

 gives us his masterpiece on fungi, " in- 

 cluding the Mycetozoa," and in speak- 

 ing of their relationship says, " For 

 various reasons, which, according to the 

 knowledge at hand, have from time to 

 time been more or less closely worked 

 out, I have, since 1858, placed the Myxo- 

 mycetes (slime-molds) under the name 

 Mycetozoa outside the vegetable king- 

 dom, and this I still consider their 

 proper place."* He does not call the 

 organisms animals, be it observed. If 

 a zoologist chooses to do so, De Bary 

 makes no objection. Meanwhile, Saville 

 Kent, zoologist, encouraged probably by 

 De Bary's position, comes forward in 



i Bary, " Morphology and Biology of Fungi," p. 478. 



