230 THE VEGETABLE WORLD. 
all directions (Fig. 300, 5,4). Under a very strong magnifier 
these moving corpuscles appear as in Fig. 300, 6. “It is,” says M. 
F. Cohn, the Botanical Professor at the University of Breslau, to 
whom we are indebted for these observations, “it is a spectacle 
truly surprising that, amidst all these movements of incredible 
activity in the bosom of the mother cell, the membrane of the cell 
is pierced at a given moment with one or many openings corres- 
ponding in form and dimensions to those we have already seen 
with the cellular sporanges. A first corpuscle escapes by one of 
these perforations, others follow, and they soon flow in multitudes. 
When movement in the water is at first slow, it is often obstructed 
by the mucilaginous envelope against which the corpuscles press 
in vain. I have seen them, after struggling for twelve hours, still 
agitating themselves tumultuously within their prison-house, 
return to a state of repose, and finally be transformed into yel- 
lowish vesicles. The active corpuscles, of which we are speaking, 
measure about the 200th part of a line in length; their form 3s 
elongated and cylindrical, and reminds us of certain small Cole- 
optera. Their posterior extremity is slightly swollen, sometimes 
flattened and enlarged at the same time, of a yellowish tint, and 
granules can frequently be traced in its interior. The anterior 
extremity, on the contrary, is elongated into a species of straight 
and glassy beak, having at its extremity two long cilia, which 
become very irritable in a solution of iodine, which seems to destroy 
the corpuscles. These movements of the ciliferous corpuscles are 
very characteristic: they are gifted with little vital energy, they 
only oscillate with their beak as if groping; if they move more 
rapidly, they turn transversely round their median axis, as a cudgel 
player would do who, holding his stick firmly by the centre, makes 
it whirl round his head; or, to illustrate it still more familiarly, 
like the cat which runs round after its own tail, without changg 
its place. But for the most part they describe a cycloid by a move- 
ment of progression by jerks and leaps, as it were; more rare y 
they advance in a right line; their natural tendency towards the 
light being indicated by the fact that in the drop of water in which 
I observed them they massed themselves voluntarily towards the 
edge nearest to the window.” 
