54 
ON THE OCCURRENCE OF ECHINOSTELIUM 
MINUTUM DE BARY, NEAR HEREFORD. 
By G&S Arthur Lister FORS: 
When the British Mycological Society met at Hereford in the 
autumn of 1902 to study the fungi of that district, Miss A. L. 
Smith put aside a part of the material collected, for further 
examination in London. Fragments of decaying vegetable 
matter were placed in a cultivating chamber at the British 
Museum, Nat. Hist. From this material there arose a scattered 
growth of extremely minute, Mucor-like bodies, scarcely visible 
without the aid of a lens. Under the microscope they showed 
a globular head, principally composed of spherical colourless 
spores, supported on a slender, colourless stalk. After some un- 
successful attempts to germinate the spores, Miss Smith made 
a glycerine mounting of the specimen, which she kindly sub- 
mitted to us last autumn. It consists of about twelve sporangia 
of Echinostelium minutum de Bary dispersed over a small 
fragment of dark vegetable substance. No unbroken heads re- 
main in the preparation, but they appear to have measured about 
50m in diameter. The stalk consists of a delicate hyaline mem- 
brane, enclosing almost colourless granular refuse matter; it is 
about 0.5 mm. in length, 25 yu broad at the base, gradually taper- 
ing to 2m at the apex; it is continued into the sporangium as 
a short columella 3 to 5 uw long, from which there springs a 
scanty colourless capillitium ; this consists of two or three main 
threads branching in a zigzag manner, sparingly anastomosing 
above and provided with many free, spine-like branchlets. At 
the base of the columella, in most of the sporangia, two to four 
globose colourless spores, 6 » diam. remain attached, precisely 
as figured by Rostafinski in his excellent drawing reproduced in 
Cooke’s Myxomycetes of Great Britain, fig. 54. The life his- 
tory and the character of the plasmodium are at present obscure, 
but the species appears to be rightly placéd by Rostafinski 
among the Mycetozoa in the division Szemonitacee ; it would 
seem to be most nearly allied to Clastoderma Debaryanum 
Blytt. This is, we believe, the first record of Echinostelium 
minutum having been obtained in Britain. 
Highcliff, Lyme Regis, January 26, 1904. 
