58 
D. D. CUNNINGHAM. 
will often force plants into flower and fruit, which, with a liberal 
supply of nutritive material, have persisted in mere continuous 
vegetable growth. This, however, is a subject hardly calling for 
detailed discussion here, but it is of importance to note that the 
coincidence of the formation of reproductive bodies with an oily 
condition of the protoplasm is of very frequent occurrence in 
fungi, and that the present experiments demonstrate that the 
presence of oil in such cases cannot be taken as necessarily indi- 
cative of excessive accumulation of nutritive material. 
The other plants in which the effects of insufficient nutrition 
were studied — Filobolus crystallinm — is in various respects not 
such a good subject for experiment. It cannot be satisfactorily 
cultivated in a medium allowing of continuous study without 
disturbance of the growing tissues ; it is impossible without great 
interference with and injury to the growing tissues to free them 
completely from extraneous matters from which they may derive 
nutrition; and the healthy growing protoplasm in almost any 
case contains a considerable amount of differentiated oily matter. 
Allowing for these drawbacks, the experiments yielded results 
essentially similar to those in regard to Choanephora. 
The materials for cultivation were furnished by the spores of 
the plant developed under natural conditions. The spores are 
at any time readily attainable in Calcutta, as portions of fresh 
cowdung kept for a day or two in a moist chamber hardly ever 
fail to produce an abundant crop of the fungus. Tresh spore 
masses, secured shortly after their discharge from the summits of 
the parent filaments, were introduced into cowdung, whichhad been 
diluted with water and subsequently boiled to secure the destruc- 
tion of extraneous fungal elements. By this means a clean crop 
of Pilobolus was secured, developed in a basis sufficiently fluid 
to render the removal of germinating spores or mycelial filaments 
an easy matter. In removing mycelia it was found impossible 
to free the filaments entirely from adherent portions of the basis 
without injuring them so greatly as to complicate the results of 
experiment, but the amount of nutritive material was reduced to 
a minimum by the adoption of the following method. A mass 
of the cowdung containing mycelium was carefully removed, and 
introduced into a watch-glass containing distilled water. Gentle 
agitation served to wash out much of the cowdung ; the water 
was then poured off and replaced by a fresh supply, renewed 
agitation applied, and this process being repeated several times, 
the mycelium was at last obtained relatively free from adherent 
particles. It was then allowed to remain in distilled water, and 
the phenomena presented by it, at various intervals from the com- 
mencement of the experiment, carefully studied. As in the case 
of the other species, the main effect following the deprivation of 
