ON THE PILOBOLIDJE. 
283 
All the authors mentioned so far correctly placed the 
genus in the immediate vicinity of Mucor. Fyies, how¬ 
ever, in 1823, considering that it was nearly allied to 
Spliasrobolus and Thelebolus, placed it 1 with them as a sub¬ 
division of the Gastromycetes, under the name of Carpoboli. 
In this error he was followed by Berkeley, in the English 
Flora 2 (1836); but four years previously, in 1832, Fries had 
already discovered his mistake, and restored it again to the 
Mucorini. 3 
Up to this time only the two species already mentioned, 
P. cnjstallinus and P. roridus, were generally known, although 
in 1828 Montague had described 4 a third, to which he gave 
the name of P. cedipus, on account of the basal reservoir 
which is so conspicuous, a feature of that species. He 
repeated it again in 1856, in his Sylloge, p. 299. 
In 1837 Corda instituted 5 the group Pilobolidese, in 
which he included Pilobolus and Chordostylum ; in 1842 he 
added to the group Pycnopodium and Caulogaster, 6 including 
in the former genus, as Pyc. lentiyevum , a species which he 
had formerly included in Pilobolus, and which would seem to 
be merely an abnormal state of Pilobolus Kleinii. It will 
be seen that the Pilobolidete of Corda is not identical with the 
Pilobolidae of Van Tiegliem. After Corda’s lamented death, 
Zobel published (1854) from his friend’s notes the sixth 
volume of the leones, in which, p. 12, is a long account of 
P. cnjstallinus , containing numerous errors; he seems in 
particular to have been entirely unacquainted with the true 
cause of the projection of the sporangium. In his drawings 
also 7 he represents the interior of the swelling as lined with 
reticulations of the orange-coloured granules, which no other 
author has seen, and which are probably only the meridional 
streams to which I have already alluded, disturbed by the 
pressure to which the preparation was subjected. 
When Cohn published, in 1851, his celebrated monograph 
“Die Entwickelungsgeschichte des Pilobolus crystallinus,” he 
had before him not that species, with which he was really 
unacquainted, but the species of Montague. He figures 
the characteristic yellow, spherical, thick-walled spores of 
1 Syst. Myc., ii., 308. 
2 Vol. v., p. 231. 
3 Syst. Myc., iii., p. 312. 
4 M6m. Soc. Linn. Lyon, pp. 1—7 cum ic. 
5 Icon. Fung, i., p. 22. 
6 Lx ., v., p. 18. 
7 L.c., pi. ii., tig. 32. 
