Badhamia utricularis and Brefeldia maxima. 1 5 
any special part of the mass. With starch and the sections of 
agarics the absorption took place in the streaming interior, 
while in the case last related, it occurred in the hyalo- 
plasm alone; the threads were completely dissolved in the 
hyaline margin, with the exception of the small fragments 
referred to, which were kept under constant observation until 
they were almost ejected by the far-retreating plasmodium. 
While I have thus endeavoured to summarise the prin- 
cipal facts brought out by earlier observations as well as 
by the experience of the last twelve months, during which 
time the organism has remained under daily notice without 
a break in its constant rhythmic motion, it may not be out 
of place to refer to some of the negative results that have 
attended these investigations. I need hardly say that they 
afford no clue to the mystery of this rhythmic streaming 
any more than they explain why, at uncertain intervals of 
hours or days, the plasmodium will rouse up without pro- 
vocation from a quiescent condition, and flow over a glass 
shade and then return to its former state. We may suppose 
that it is searching for food, but this is far from accounting 
for the unity of action that appears to pervade the creature. 
At the risk of being tedious, I give the following note 
taken in February, 1887: — Plasmodium under a glass bell 
four inches high by four wide, crawled up the sides, com- 
pletely clothing the shade with the most exquisite yellow 
tracery ; on the following day this had changed to a loose 
reticulation of thicker orange-coloured veins ; on adding water 
upon the plate beneath, the whole of the glass was in a 
short time covered with delicate little fans of yellow plas- 
modium starting from the orange veins, as it were, clothing 
the bare stems with leaves. I then introduced two pieces 
of Stereum , and in five hours the plasmodium, which for two 
days had overspread the shade, had almost entirely retreated 
and concentrated upon the Stereum. 
Here we had an area of about forty square inches, covered 
with two or three hundred little advancing fans of plas- 
modium, springing from a network of branches, which was 
