Notes. 
34i 
in which was a piece of moist filter-paper with a Peziza cup, for it 
rapidly * attacked the hymenium in the dark, and gnawed just such 
holes in it as I had noticed. 
In a few hours also the animal had left little ellipsoidal pellets of 
dung on the glass, paper, &c., and the bright scarlet colour of these 
told plainly the nature of his food. Microscopic examination of the 
dung-pellets showed abundance of spores, apparently uninjured, and 
now it seemed as if the problem was at length to be solved : of course 
it had suggested itself that the spores required passage through the 
body of the slug as a condition for germination. 
Here again, however, nothing but failure attended all my efforts. 
It was very easy to obtain the spores, in the dung, in hanging- drops ; 
yet in no case would they germinate, but behaved as if dead, until 
Bacteria obscured the view and the culture had to be abandoned. 
Failure to germinate the spores has also attended every attempt 
made since the winter, in the hope that exposure to frost and 
a winter-rest might be necessary for germination, as is known to be 
the case with other spores. 
H. MARSHALL WARD. 
ON THE GINGER-BEER PLANT.— In my work on the 
Ginger-Beer Plant (Phil. Trans., B. 1892, p. 187) I pointed out the 
resemblances between Kephir and this symbiotic compound organism. 
On p. 186 I also gave reasons for believing that the Bacterium was 
introduced with the sugar. 
1 have now good reasons for believing that the early accounts of 
Kephir are not correct, or that there are several distinct varieties of 
this and other Ginger-beer plants, and that in all cases the Schizomy- 
cete I named Bacterium vermiforme is concerned, but associated with 
different yeasts; in any case, it appears certain that it can be 
artificially made to form a symbiotic union with other yeasts than the 
one I used in 1892 ; the aerobic yeast protecting the anaerobic 
Bacterium. 
The following note is of interest in this connexion. 
My wife recently received from a lady in Paris a number of grains 
of a body looking like boiled sago, and obviously of some such nature 
as Kephir or the Ginger-beer plant. It was said to have been given 
to our hostess by a missionary from Madagascar, who described it as 
‘an excrescence on the sugar-cane/ 
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