35 ° 
Essed \ — The Panama Disease. I. 
the upper part was cut off so as to expose a comparatively large surface, 
was left on my table. Within a few days I noticed that the process of 
putrefaction was rapidly advancing, turning the upper surface to a black 
corrugated mass. Shortly after that it was covered with silvery shining 
mycelium, upon which the already known gemmae were found when some 
small bits were brought under microscope. Later on I discovered two 
branched, antler-like, hairy, orange-coloured bodies arising on little protru- 
sions bare of hyphae. One lobe of each was cut off and examined under 
the microscope ; it consisted of closely packed hyphae, of which some were 
fertile, bearing conidia and gemmae — the identical Fusarium conidia and 
gemmae treated of before — whereas the remainder were sterile, the free 
ends sticking out and producing the hairy appearance of the upper part of 
the lobes. 
The bodies were allowed to develop ; they grew in a fortnight to 
double the size, when they were seen to wither and crumple, probably for want 
of moisture. Taken off with a portion of the underlying tissue and brought 
under low power, the basal part proved to be a bit of sclerotium. Sections 
were then made of the entire bodies, in the one case longitudinal, in the 
other transverse sections. Remarkable developmental changes had taken 
place ; across the apices of the lobes a pseudo-parenchyma of a pink colour 
had arisen ; the conidia had disappeared, and only a few gemmae were still 
to be found in the sinus between two lobes. 
The stalk, +Jcm. high, consisted of a bright, yellowish brown pseudo- 
parenchyma, and was perfectly sterile. The broader upper half was enclosed 
in a sheath of closely packed paraphyses with free terminations, supporting, 
as it were, the pink-coloured stroma ; they themselves were of a bright 
orange-red colour. The transverse as well as the longitudinal sections 
showed that the fruit body was not solid all over, but that in the median 
part a large air-space was partly filled up by strands of pseudo-parenchyma 
connecting the opposite walls of the cavity and producing a kind of spongy 
parenchyma. 
I gather from the foregoing facts that I am justified in considering 
the structures in question as prematurely withered, ascigerous fruit bodies, 
which would have produced the asci in or on the pseudo-parenchymatous 
terminal discs (stromata), if the conditions had been favourable to their 
development. It has, of course, yet to be proved, and fully occupies my atten- 
tion still ; but since the raising of fruit bodies of Ascomycetes is not always 
possible in the laboratory, and the systematic position of the fungus could 
be determined from the pronounced pleomorphism, the development of 
a brightly coloured stroma, and in general from the great resemblance to 
many members of the well-defined homogeneous order of the Hypocreaceae, 
I think it right to classify it with this order ; and on account of the forma- 
tion of chlamydospores out of sclerotia, the mode of germination of these 
