100 



The Naturalist. 



may be consulted for full and elaborate details and carefully executed 

 illustrations. 



It is reproduced sexually in a manner which closely resembles that 

 described in Saprol^gnia. Some of , the articulated hyphoe give rise to 

 thickwalled spherical oogonia, while neighbouring ones produce smaller 

 bodies termed Antheridia. These come into contact by a sort of conju- 

 gation, and as a result the contents of the Oogonia become converted 

 into oospores. After passing through a period of rest, these germinate, 

 and either produce vegetative threads which form the ordinary mycelium, 

 or biciliated zoospores, which ultimately become quiescent, and then 

 grow up into new plants. 



Carpospoee-E. We now come to an extraordinarily large number of 

 fungi, very various in external form and appearance, of which our know- 

 ledge is of a somewhat fragmentary character, but which are provision- 

 ally placed among the CarposjjorecB. They constitute the orders desig- 

 nated by fiingologists Ascomi/cdes, JEcidionujcetes, Usfilaginece, and 

 Basidioviycetes, the general of which will be familiar to all who 

 have given any attention to these members of the vegetable kingdom. 

 In the three last orders, the existence of a sexual mode of propagation 

 can hardly be said as yet to have been satisfactorily demonstrated, though 

 in a few instances it has been asserted and circumstantially described. 

 Confirmatory observations, however, are still desiderated, and until these 

 come to hand, we shall err on the safe side in not building too much on 

 what rests upon the investigations of single observers. 



Ascomj/cefes. With respect to the Ascomi/cetes, however, no such 

 caution is necessary, as in all the families it includes, sexual generation 

 may be confidently stated to take place. Thus in ErysipJie and its 

 allies, the small globular perithecia or concepticles, are in fact but the 

 sexually produced fruits, formed by means of sexual organs ; and the 

 same may be said of the Eurotium form of Aspergillus glaucus. In 

 PemcilVium^ as well as in other genera of Tuberaceoe and in the Pyreno- 

 7/jgcetes, the hitherto much misunderstood sclerotia have also been shown 

 to be in close connection with a sexual act. 



It is, however, in the Discomycetes that we have perhaps the most 

 interesting details connected with the sexual reproduction of this order. 

 The family is tolerably well known from the fact that it includes the 

 whole of the Pezizas and Ascoboli, which are almost universally 

 distributed, and are as common as they are numerous. A vertical 

 section through a typical species shows that it consists of a vegetative 

 part composed of fine mycelial filaments, and a reproductive part which 

 is usually designated as the " receptacle," or " apothecium." The latter 



