412 Cutting .—On the Sexuality and Development of 
Miss Welsford (17) in their paper ‘ Further contributions to the Cytology 
of the Ascomycetes ’, the subject need not be further entered into here. 
In Ascophanus carneus we have another example of a reduced fertiliza- 
tion, and in this case also two fusions have been seen, the one in the 
ascogonium representing the sexual fusion, and the other, the fusion which 
is the usual preliminary to the formation of the ascus. 
The ascogonium of this form presents many points of similarity 
to that of Ascobolus furfur aceus , the two most striking differences being 
that, in the latter, only one ascogonial cell gives off ascogenous hyphae, and 
that, as has been described by Harper (19) and confirmed by Miss 
Welsford (27), the cells of the archicarp are uninucleate when first formed. 
This latter statement has been denied by Dangeard (10) who says that the 
ascogonium is multinucleate at its inception. The mere fact that the cells 
of the ordinary vegetative mycelium of the fungus are multinucleate at once 
presents a difficulty, when one tries to imagine the way in which an ascogo- 
nium with uninucleate cells could originate on it. Neither Harper nor 
Miss Welsford used pure cultures, nor did they succeed in obtaining any- 
thing like a complete series from the uninucleate to the multinucleate 
condition of the archicarp. In the absence of such a series it is not at all 
impossible that the fruit with the uninucleate ascogonium may belong 
to another fungus, and not to Ascobolus furfur aceus. It will also be remem- 
bered that the descriptions of this young fruit given by Harper and Miss 
Welsford do not agree, the former recording well-marked pores between 
the ascogonial cells and the latter finding no pores at all at this stage. 
Dangeard describes pores even in the earliest stages of the ascogonium of 
Ascobolus , and he regards these pores as comparable to the ones found 
in the vegetative hyphae. This description of their structure and of their 
origin as multinucleate cells would agree more closely with what I have 
found in Ascophanus carneus , but whether the ascogonium of Ascobolus 
is multinucleate at its origin or uninucleate, I think that it is comparable to 
that of Ascophanus - 1 Miss Fraser and Miss Chambers (16) mention that the 
archicarp of Ascobolus furfur aceus seems to have a sterile stalk, but whether 
it has a sterile tip-portion I have been unable to make out from the pub- 
lished accounts : however, Taf. XII, Fig. 44 of Harpers paper (19), and PI. IV, 
Fig. 5 of Miss Welsford’s paper (27) would seem to suggest that this is so. 
In Ascophanus carneus the ascogonial cells are very nearly of the same 
size, fusions take place in all of them, and the majority, if not all, of these 
cells give off ascogenous hyphae ; for these reasons I regard all of the 
ascogonial cells of Ascophanus as female. In Ascobolus , as Miss Welsford 
has pointed out, the central cell must be regarded as female, but the other 
1 The ascogonium of Melanospora parasitica , from the description given by Kihlmann (22), 
would also seem to be very similar to that of Ascophanus , but the details of its structure and 
development have yet to be worked out. 
