370 
Freda 51. Bachmann 
Historical Sketch. 
What Tulasne has called the spermogonia of lichens were, accord- 
ing to Tulasne (81) and Lindsay (59), first discovered and figured by 
Hedwig in Amptycliia ciliaris. Along with tlie soredia of some lichens, I 
Hedwig considered these to be male Organs and writes of thern as “punc- 
tula mascula” or “flores masculi”. Shortly after this they canie to be ; 
considered by some of the students of the time as parasitic fungi on the 
thallus of the liehen. Flotow (31) in 1850 described the “parasite” on i 
Arthonia fuliginosa and placed it in the genus Pyrenothea. The fruit body | 
he (31) described as a perithecium without asci or paraphyses and con- 
taining only atom-like sporidia. Fries (39) had also thought these sper- 
mogonia to be aborted apothecia. Itzigsohn (53) held to the older idea ] 
of Hedwig. He believed that the spermatia were motile and similar 
to the male cells of Polytrichum and Marchantia, lience he called them 
sper matozoids, and the spermogonia, antlieridia. A few montlis 
later, in a second paper, he (54) confirmecl his earlier observations but 
added that Rabenhorst and Kützing had written him of their failure 
to see any movement of these small cells. He also noted that Flotow 
had observed a movement of the cells, but, finding the same in material 
which had been in the herbarium for twenty years, had concluded that 
it was only a molecular movement. A year later, in a letter to Itzigsohn 
(55), Rabenhorst wrote that he saw such a movement as had been 
described by the former. 
Tulasne (81) failing to see any resemblance between these flask- 
sliaped filamentous structures in lichens on the one hand and the anther- 
idia of mosses and hepatics on the other, and not finding their contents 
motile, proposed to call them spermogonia and the small cells pro- 
duced in them and set free through their ostioles, spermatia. He gave 
excellent figures of the spermogonia and spermatia in about fifty different 
species of lichens. He found that the size and shape of the spermatia 
vary as between the different species, but in every case he found them 
borne on specialized hyphae, the spermatiophores, in pocketlike de- 
pressions in the thallus, the spermogonia, and finally extruded through 
the ostiole of the spermogonium onto the surface of the thallus. In a 
later paper (82), and in his Selecta Fungorum Carpologia (83) he has 
shown that tliere are several kinds of reproductive bodies in the ascomy- 
cetes — endospores, stylospores, spermatia, and conidia. Of these, the 
stylospores and spermatia are borne in special cup-shaped structures, 
the pyenidia and the spermogonia. According to Tulasne, spermatia 
