STARVATION OF VEGETABLE AND ANIMAL TISSUES. 57 
and the granules swarm free in the tube cavity, or unite into 
large oil globules, which may be dissolved out in ether, and aro 
redeposited as globules and fat crystals on the evaporation of 
the reagent. 
3rd. Cultivations of mycelium in distilled water , — The pro- 
cedure followed in these experiments was similar to that in the 
case of those with the germinal tubes; the only diflPerence lying 
in the fact that here the fungal elements were allowed to remain 
in the nutritive medium for a longer period, and until a consider- 
able development of mycelium had occurred. As a rule, whilst 
the nutritive fluid was replaced by water in three or four hours 
from the period at which the conidia were sown in the experi- 
ments on the germinal tubes, the substitution was not carried out 
here until after the lapse of eight or ten hours. The primary 
effects of the treatment in the present series were identical with 
those described as occurring in the former one, but while in 
that series the process ran rapidly through various stages of fatty 
transformation and disintegration without the occurrence of any 
further development, one result of depriving a formed mycelium 
of nutritive material is almost invariably the development of 
fructification within the course of the next twelve hours. 
The form of fructification characterising such cultivations is 
sporangial. As a result of previous experience, this form had 
been determined in the case of Choanephora to be developed 
under circumstances of defective nutrition dependent on various 
causes — on disproportion between the numbers of conidia sown 
in a nutritive fluid and its amount, on employing a fluid wdiich 
was originally weak or had become exhausted by previous culti- 
vations, &c. ; but no other procedure appears to afford such 
certain production of a crop of sporangia. When the mycelial 
filaments have not been entirely emptied of their contents during 
this development, the condition of these is identical with that 
occurring in the case of germinal tubes which have been exposed 
to starvation for a similar period, and the development is pro- 
bably to be ascribed to a utilisation by one portion of the proto- 
plasm of materials derived from the disintegration of another 
portion. 
In all three series of experiments the results were similar in 
showing that fatty change and ultimate disintegration of the 
protoplasm are direct results of insufficient nutrition. The 
development of reproductive bodies coincidently with these 
processes is very interesting, but by no means so anomalous as 
it might at first sight appear. There are many facts showing 
that the antagonism between individual growflh and reproduction 
is not to be ascribed solely to expenditure in one direction 
counterbalancing that in another, lloot-pruning and poor soil 
