On the Characters, or Marks, employed for 
classifying the Schizomycetes. 
BY 
H. MARSHALL WARD, Sc.D. (Camb.), F.R.S. 
Professor of Botany in the Forestry School, Royal Indian College , Coopers Hill. 
T HOSE who have contributed to the bringing about of 
the existing state of chaos in the classifying of the 
Schizomycetes have much to answer for, and the task of 
unravelling the tangled skein of records will be no less 
honoured than onerous, which is saying a good deal. With- 
out implying any competition for that honour, it may be 
of some little use to try and show how the chaos has come 
about, and to discover a way out of it, or at least to discover 
one or two paths which might be put together to make a 
way out of it. 
I take it that two chief sets of causes have been at work, in 
different directions, to bring about the deadlock ; on the one 
hand, the botanists of the past decade have confined their 
attention too exclusively to the morphological characters of 
the various species they have created, while, on the other, 
the bacteriologists — using the word simply in its technical 
sense — have directed their attention too exclusively to the 
behaviour of their species on or in certain media, especially 
on gelatine. It is not implied, intentionally at any rate, that 
either class of observers has wilfully neglected the observa- 
tions of the other ; but it needs no pointing out that each 
[Annals of Botany, Vol. VI. No. XXI. April, 1892.] 
