Marvels of the Universe 683 
under the name of Mycetozoa, outside the limits of the vegetable kingdom.’’ Yet, in spite of this, 
he continued to include them in his later botanical works. In this country Lister supported De Bary, 
and Saville Kent went so far as to include them in his “‘ Manual of the Infusoria.”” Cooke and 
Massee, on the other hand, have contended strongly for their retention as an aberrant group of 
Fungi. Lister wrote a big ‘“‘ Monograph of the Mycetozoa”’ for the British Museum Trustees, in 
which he claimed them as animals; but the queer thing is that Lister’s collection is exhibited in 
the Botanical Gallery of the Natural History Museum ! 
The Myxies—as we may call them shortly—are propagated by invisible spores or germs, much 
after the manner of fungi, mosses and ferns ; and when these spores alight on the moist surface of 
decaying vegetable matter, whether leaves or wood, they germinate and out creeps a microscopical 
speck of living jelly—a swarm-cell—very similar to the low form of life known as an Amoeba. We 
cannot say that it has any definite form, for its outline is constantly changing; but under the 
higher powers of the microscope we can make out a denser portion known as the nucleus, which 
appears to be the most important part of the creature, and several clear spaces, called vacuoles, 
There is no mouth, no internal organs, no eyes, no limbs. Soon it develops a long, lash-like ex- 
tension of one end, and this we know to be the front part from the fact that the lash moves 
forward and the rest follows. If it comes across bacteria, or any other of the minute organisms that 
are engaged in breaking up the dead wood, it flows around them, gets them into a vacuole and there 
digests them. Then the nucleus divides into two, and the division extends across the rest of the 
jelly, so that we have two Amcebe instead of one. Scores or hundreds of them may divide in the 
same manner, and again divide a little later; so that soon we may have thousands of them. This 
goes on for a few days, then they all withdraw their lashes, and amalgamate into one mass of jelly 
—the protoplasm of which all living things, animal and vegetable, are formed. The mass is termed 
a plasmodium. 
This amalgamation takes place in the decayed tissues of wood or leaf, but at a certain stage 
Photo by) [L. Step, FDS. 
PLANT OR ANIMAL? 
The creamy mass from inside the box has passed through the perforated side, and concentrated itself into two cushion- 
like masses over which a thin brown crust forms, whilst the contents breaks up into dust-like spores, 
49 
