Lecture on the Parasitic Fungi of the British Farm. 397 



clean it, inhaled them, and were seized with violent pains in the 

 head, giddiness, and vomiting, which only yielded to severe medical 

 treatment. A penicillium is the mould of milk, and we have 

 here a magnified representation of its development. (See Fig. 20.) 

 The penicillium may be here 

 noticed developing itself from 

 the mass of mould. If these 

 moulds appear much in the 

 dairy or on the bread kept in 

 it, the best remedy is washing 

 the walls with chloride of lime, 

 which it is important to know, 

 as milk often suffers greatly in 

 this way. Foreign badly made 

 cheese has an unpleasant mould 

 in brilliant scarlet patches ; but 

 in England the principal one on 

 cheese is an innocent mould 

 called torula, from torus, a bed, 

 from its coming in layers. I 

 may here just observe that the vinegar plant, as it is called, is in 

 its advanced state a penicillium ; and the beer fungus has been 

 called torula ; but before we decide the latter, we must see a 

 regular fructification in air. There are hundreds of non-pro- 

 ductive spawns for want of air and light, as, for example, the 

 strange forms which diffuse themselves in cellars, which are 

 incomplete developments. 



You will permit me to state in this place, that the fungi on 

 stored fruit are a torula, a penicillium, common fruit mucor, and 

 a mould like the first stage of the erysiphe. Harting asserts that 

 he has actually propagated the potato disease from the brown 

 matter in mouldy apples and pears, and it is remarkable that 

 some ingenious experiments of Mr. Berkeley, on the growth of 

 bunt, lead to show that its propagation may arise from mere 

 grumous matter in the spores, which proves that many of our 

 theories are immature. The experiments were thus made : — 

 Wheat seeds were immersed in a mixture of water and the spores 

 of bunt. A curious mould with conjugated spores sprung up on 

 the spores of bunt. The wheat was sown, and the plants came 

 up infected ; but no communication could be traced between the 

 cells and the shoots thrown out by the spores ; no intrusion of 

 the mycelium developed by the spores into the wheat could be dis- 

 covered. The inference is that the fine contents of the spores 

 propagate the fungus ; but this is quite opposed to our general 

 ideas of the growth of fungals. 



