31 
growth, time of fruiting, etc., were made as would enable us to 
tell how soon after sowing spores we might expect a new growth 
in a condition for use as infection material. 
As a general result of these experiments it appeared that the 
medium used made but little difference with respect to promptness 
of germination or the rate of subsequent growth, these being de¬ 
pendent, within the limits of our trials, on temperature rather than 
on the particular kind of nutriment provided for the growing 
fungus. 
A mixture of raw corn meal with beef broth, to form a stiff 
batter, was on the whole the best substance used by us this year, 
and the Mason fruit-jar—the metal cap of which had been altered 
by the insertion of a tin tube for the reception of a cotton safety 
plug—was the most convenient and cheapest vessel in which to 
grow the fungus. 
The average time elapsing between the sowing of the spores 
and a visible surface growth was two days, although in a few 
•cases growth was detected on the day after infection, and in one case 
an interval of three days elapsed. This last, however, was a 
•culture on sawdust wet with beef broth, in which the whole 
growth was very scanty and slow, and consequently inconspicuous 
at first. 
The surface of the substance infected was substantially covered 
by a spread of the growth from its many scattered centers in 
from three days to a week, with an average of five days, and 
heads of young spores began to show within the tube or jar, to 
an ordinary observation, in from five to ten days. The spores 
began to ripen, as evidenced by a yellowish tint of the surface of 
the culture, in from one to two weeks, with an average period of 
nine or ten days; and they were thoroughly ripe and easily de¬ 
tached by jarring or shaking in eleven to twenty-one days, or 
after an average interval of about two weeks. 
From trials made with fungus cultures that had lain some 
months after drying out spontaneously, it appeared that dry spores 
not less than five or six months old grew as promptly and as 
freely as if they were fresh, but the original Thaxter culture, on 
the other hand, was completely dead seven months after its 
receipt by us. 
A single experiment, which has been verified by later work, 
showed that when the temperature of the moist culture medium 
approximated 100°, germination of the spores was prevented. 
Three trials made with the usual culture medium acidulated 
with tartaric acid of three to five per cent., showed that this kind 
»/ was fatal to the experiment, as no growth 
occurred. 
The infection of suitable culture substances from dead insects ob¬ 
tained in the field, covered with Sporotrichum, occasionally gave pure 
growths of this parasitic fungus, but much more frequently the 
growths were mixed, other fungi ultimately crowding out the 
Sporotrichum, if, indeed, this were permitted to start at all. It 
would be better, consequently, as a rule, to make the original 
