118 
water in a large damp room, in a few days (four to six) 
already allowed me in some specimens to follow the indivi- 
dual development of the Protomyxa further. In all the 
balls the orange-red plasma contents divided, after it had 
retracted itself from the hyaline capsular wall, into a great 
number (several hundreds) of small round, thoroughly struc- 
tureless, naked halls. This division did not stop with 
a repeated bipartite division of the encysted plasma-body ; 
but, meantime, a great number of individual centres of at- 
traction in the homogeneous plasma mass were differenti- 
ated, and similar plasma portions congregated round these 
central points. r lhe process wmuld consequently be better 
conceived as a germ formation (Monosporogonia), than as 
a process of division or gemmation. 1 
The small red balls (of 0 017 mm. diameter) remained 
several days longer in the thick-walled cyst, entirely filling 
its interior without any further change being perceptible in 
them. When I placed them again under the microscope 
after the lapse of about a week, I noticed in some of them a 
slow movement of the balls inside the cyst. The motion 
consisted in no regular rotation of the balls, but in a slow 
change of place among them, in which they crowded in all 
directions among each other without any fixed order. 
Some hours afterwards the motion had become livelier ; 
and the red balls had assumed a pear-shaped form, in which 
one end was produced into a fine point. In their confused 
motions within the cyst they changed the shape of their soft, 
pear-shaped bodies many times, becoming sometimes drawn 
out into a longer, sometimes into a shorter club-shaped body, 
and sometimes they became twisted. 
Next day I found one of the cysts burst ; the empty 
collapsed wall lay shrivelled at the bottom of the watch-glass, 
and a great number of small club- or pear-shaped red bodies 
moved about freely in the sea-water. It now appeared that 
the red balls were the sporules of the Protomyxa, and that 
they danced about after issuing from the cyst like Flagellata, 
or like the sporules of Algse. I now burst, with a slight 
pressure of the object-glass, another cyst, in which the motion 
of the germs inside was already perceptible, and immediately 
saw the small, red, pear-shaped bodies issue in a thick swarm 
from the burst membrane (fig. 4). Immediately after the exit 
the form was more slender, being drawn out into a longer tail 
at the front end, and the motion was perceptibly accelerated 
(fig. 5). The form of the free sporules (fig. 5) or the tail- 
bearing germs (or rather germ-cytodes) was slender, pear- 
1 Vide ‘Generelle Morphologie,’ vol. ii, p. 70. 
