Arthur Lister. 



vii 



and equipped. This enterprise he carried through with all his strength and 

 enthusiasm. He regarded it as of the highest importance to be able to deal 

 with truant boys with rigorous strictness, but also to keep them uncon- 

 taminated by the criminal associations to which they were subject in 

 industrial schools. He took great pains in the selection of teachers and 

 endeared himself to them by the sympathetic interest he took in their labours. 



He was an active and valued member of the local bench of magistrates, no 

 sinecure in a district including a large East London element. He was glad 

 to work hard, often sitting in the courts three days a week during the summer 

 and early autumn months, and his brother magistrates gladly acquiesced, in 

 their turn, in his absence at other times of the year. He also gave much time 

 and attention to the work of the Essex County Council. 



Notwithstanding these varied activities he was able to carry on a good deal 

 of scientific work even at Leytonstone. Epping Forest and Wanstead Park 

 in the immediate neighbourhood furnished fine hunting grounds. On moving 

 clown to Lyme in middle or late autumn he looked forward to months of 

 continuous and happy scientific labour undisturbed by public cares. 



His third daughter, Gulielma, as she grew up, became his especial companion 

 and assistant in his scientific work, and all his natural history pursuits. She 

 easily acquired his bird lore, and became at least as skilled an observer as he. 

 Her training, at Bedford College, had given her a good grounding in systematic 

 and structural botany, and her fine skill as a draughtswoman was an invaluable 

 asset in their common labours. 



While working at moulds and other fungi my father had met with repre- 

 sentatives of the Mycetozoa in their sporangial stage. Now regarded as a 

 group of Protozoa, they were at that time usually classified with fungi. Their 

 remarkable life-history soon engaged his eager attention. He watched the 

 hatching of the spores into the flagellate active stage, the transition from 

 rlagellula to amcebula and the fusion of these to form the creeping plasmodia, 

 the sclerotial stage of this and the final development of the plasmodium into 

 sporangia. He became very skilful in dealing -with these organisms, in the 

 various phases of their life-history. 



While hunting one day, in the winter of 1876-7, in Epping Forest he 

 came on a mass of the brilliant yellow plasmodium of Badhamia utricularis, 

 which has the habit, almost unique in the group, of feeding not on dead 

 vegetable matter but on certain living fungi. It was spread over a growth 

 of the fungus Stereum hirsutum which had sprung from a hornbeam stump. 

 The whole was brought home and carefully protected and observed. Parts 

 were allowed to pass into the dry sclerotial phase in which the protoplasm, 

 having assumed the condition of a mass of minute cysts, is able to retain its 

 vitality for months or even years, resuming its activity on being wetted and 

 supplied with the proper food material. A fragment of the sclerotium thus 

 revived will grow rapidly if properly fed, so that in a few weeks a film of 

 yolky protoplasm covering a soup-plate full of Stereum- may be obtained 

 from a morsel no bigger than a pin's head. This mass furnished the 



