io8 Chodat . — On the Polymorphism of the Green 
(wet walls) from two to four spores with rather thick walls. 
Simply by cultivation in common water the production of 
numerous naked spores is obtained in a few hours. They 
are, as in the former case, extruded by the gelification of the 
separating walls, and finally this substance disappears by 
solution. The nature and persistency of this material plays 
a very important part in the evolution of this group, as will 
shortly be shown. The limit of the number of normal spores 
is as a general rule two or four ; the maturation of these 
spores is rapid, and when they are discharged from the 
mother-cell they have already acquired the peculiarities of the 
latter. In this case it is not surprising that the production of 
zoospores takes place so rarely. 
The form of the mother-cell is in the lower species, or 
in the lower conditions, globular, but in some other species 
or adult conditions it becomes altered, and a great variety 
is found among the representatives of this group ( Oocystis , 
Kir chner iella 1 , Lager heimia 2 , N ephrocytium). 
These different forms existing, two kinds of reproduction 
can take place. First, the cell-contents being divided into 
four (as is the case in most of them), these are sometimes only 
discharged very tardily. Growth takes place within the 
mother-cell, and by direct heredity these spores assume by 
degrees the same form as the mother-cell. The most striking 
example is given in Lager heimia genevensis , a single-celled 
ellipsoid form, with four to eight long prolongations; the spores 
at the moment of their expulsion, and even before, are 
provided with the same appendages. Such a spore, having 
at the moment of its extrusion the form and external 
peculiarities of the mother-cell, has been named by me an 
autospore. 
In such cases this mode of reproduction, although the 
commoner and more fixed mode, can be replaced under other 
conditions by true spores, and also, but very rarely, by 
zoospores, from which the others are derived, as is in some 
1 Chodat, Bull. Herb. Boiss., 1895, p. 301, Fig. 3. 
2 Sur le genre Lagerheimia , Nuova Notarisia, 1895, p. 86. 
