4 
NATURE NOTES. 
size of the crimson clubs. As it rises, countless pink spores 
will be lifted out of their spore case, so that again the wind may 
blow them away. This beautiful thing is given the name of 
Arcyria. • 
These are only a few of the species of Mycetozoa which are 
easily to be found by any one with sharp eyes who cares to look 
for them. 
And now for a few words about these spores, and what 
becomes of them. They are beautiful objects, with a great 
variety of exquisite markings on their coloured walls, which are 
important characters in determining the species, and which will 
require a ^th object glass to make out. But their chief interest 
is in the way they behave when the winds have taken them to 
the suitable places for them to grow in. If you dust some spores 
on a glass slide, putting a very little drop of spirit to send out 
the air from among them, and then immediately add a drop of 
water, and place on the top a square cover slip, supported on 
one side by a strip of paper to prevent pressure, you may see in 
the course of a few hours that the spore wall will break, and out 
will creep a minute, transparent, living creature, which in a short 
time will push out a long cilium in front. In about a quarter of 
an hour it will give a few lashing movements with its cilium and 
swim away with a dancing motion to feed on bacteria, or take in 
nourishment in some other way, and live for a while an indepen- 
dent existence. After a time it will draw in the cilium, turn into 
a round ball, and divide itself in two ; each half will then throw 
out a cilium again, and live as the parent did, and so they will 
keep on dividing and dividing. At last they will stop this work 
of division, and when the transparent bodies meet each other as 
the}' creep about, they will unit? and coalesce. When scores 
have thus become united there will be set up a wonderful sort of 
circulation in the viscid substance, and it will continue to grow 
till it forms a plasmodiiim, as it is called, sometimes as broad as 
your hand. If you manage to make ih\^ plasmodiim crawl on a 
glass slide — for it wanders about looking for food in a most 
remarkable manner — you will see under the microscope that it 
spreads out in a network of veins and a torrent of circulation 
streams through them. This current will go on for a minute and 
a half and then stop, and at once begin to stream in the opposite 
direction, and so this rhythmic flow will go on for hours, days or 
weeks, until at last the time comes for it to change into spores. 
Then, in the case of the Trichia, it forms itself into clusters of 
snow-white balls, and in a few hours these change to the yellow 
bodies like mustard seeds which you gathered on the stump, and 
the plasmodiiim will form into twisted threads and multitudes of 
fresh spores, and the round of changes comes to an end. 
If this short sketch of the Mycetozoa should encourage any 
readers of Nature Notes to make themselves acquainted with 
their beauties, of which a half has not been told, it may be well 
to offer a few suggestions with regard to the way of proceeding. 
In^the first place the Mycetozoa are most easy to preserve in 
