330 



Mycologia 



protoplasm, refers to JEthalium and goes on to say : " It may 

 happen that the substance creeps up the stems of plants a metre 

 high and moves in the form of thin threads becoming collected 

 above on large leaves as thick cakes the size of the hand. . . . 

 There remains no doubt whatever that we have here to do with a 

 structure which resembles in every detail the circulating protoplasm 

 in living plant cells, only its mass is relatively extraordinarily 

 large." 



What we have to account for is the continuous stream that car- 

 ries on until" apparently the source of supply is exhausted, and 

 accumulates at considerable elevation masses to be weighed in 

 ounces, say, half a pound. It matters not that ascent was made a 

 meter high; a centimeter high would do just as well, as far as 

 that goes. I have photographed the same thing, eight feet above 

 its base of operations, seated in the crotch of a vigorous bur-oak 

 tree. 



It is an old story. Men have been watching the phenomenon 

 for two hundred years. Linne saw the mucors, as he called them, 

 but was less a student. The greater man by far, the greatest 

 mycologist the world has known, devotes pages to our problem. 

 Fries says in Systema Mycologicum : " Often have my eyes, not 

 without peculiar pleasure, watched the transition from weak be- 

 ginnings to the perfection of complete development. The celerity 

 in most of them is marvellous. At one time (for safe carriage) 

 I deposited the plasmodium of a Diachcea in my hat, and within 

 the space of one hour it had covered the greater part of it with its 

 elegant white net work." 



It must not be supposed that the outer head of the great Swedish 

 student, no matter how brilliant the brain it covered, left the inner 

 surface of the hat any less free from what, for cytoplasm, printers 

 might term " objectionable matter," than would be the case did the 

 hat cover the best brushed and tended human capital to be found 

 in Chicago, and yet I have no doubt whatever of the accuracy of 

 the Friesian narrative. 



Permit me to cite a more recent observation : On the shore of 

 an Iowa lake, not far from the water edge, I found one morning 

 in July, 1909, a plasmodium emerging from beneath a boulder and 



