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filaments acquired a mucedinous character, and produced 
moniliform hyaline penicillate acrospores, and thus consti- 
tuted a slender penicillium. This subsequently disappears 
under culture. But before it disappears, he has observed in 
the endospore a hyaline protoplasm, turbid in the middle, 
composed of very minute white granulations, which, as it 
were, by coagulation formed a solid white corpuscle in the 
cavity of each cell of the spore, and that this afterwards gra- 
dually increased after the fashion of an embryo, and at length, 
in the third month, filled the entire cavities of both cells of 
the endospore. At the same time, the wall of the two cells 
showed the concentric strata to have become sensibly looser, 
and was fissured by several fine transverse rimulse preparing 
for its future dissolution, which a parasitic mucedinous vege- 
tation would also promote. Dr. Nylander has noticed these 
phenomena from March till June. Then the spores, denuded 
of penicillium, show a white corpuscle in each cell, which dis- 
tends the spiral wall, and ultimately expels an oblong cor- 
puscle, which, when free, enlarges, and is most probably the 
commencement of the thallus of the lichen. 
On the Change of the Gonidia of Lichens into Zoospores. 
By MM. A. Famnitzin and J. Boranetsky. Ann. des Sci. 
Nat., Ser. 5, vol. viii, translated in the Annals and Mag. 
Nat. Hist., February, 1869. — The authors of this valuable 
account of the reproduction in lichens observe — 
“ The most delicate and at the same time most important 
point of these researches was to establish incontestably that 
the zoosporal cellules were really the gonimic cellules, and 
not some other organism which had been accidentally de- 
veloped in our apparatus. We believe that the following 
facts demonstrate this fully : 
“1. We obtained the zoospores by means of gonidia sown 
on the surface of bits of bark previously boiled in water, and 
consequently cleansed from living organisms. Direct ob- 
servation has demonstrated, moreover, that our seed-beds did 
not contain any other green organism besides the gonidia 
which we had deposited in them, and that they were only 
polluted by some filaments of a Hyphomycetes which had 
probably been transported on the bark or existed in the 
water in which the lichen had been macerated. 
“2. The changes which we have described were observed 
not only in a very great number of free gonimic cellules, but 
also in gonidia still attached to the medullary filaments. 
From these latter we have repeatedly observed the zoospores 
to escape ; and under the action of iodine the membrane of 
