Page 57 - My FlipBook

into the air, called hyphea, which are the fruit stalks. This ;
is the ordinary house mold, of which there are many very
interesting varieties. I once undertook a little study of the
molds, the spores of which I could find in the dust in my of-
fice. In a few weeks I had isolated twenty-five species of
these molds, simply from shakino^ a cushion or gathering a
little dust here and there. They are beautiful microscopic
objects, simply white filamentous bunches when seen with
the naked eye, or becoming black, red or purple, many of
them, as their spores ripen. In the toadstools and mush-
rooms these threads are compressed in the form of a stem
they have no roots proper, no roots that are visible. The
mycelium that I have pictured here grows in the surface of
the earth and then the toadstool is simply the stem that is
put up for seeding purposes, and that stem is composed of
millions of these threads condensed into a more or less solid
mass, and on top of that the umbrella-Hke fixture which has
upon its lower surface the spores, gills, in which the spores
are formed. Examine this microscopically and you will find
the whole structure made up of these threads compressed to-
gether to form the stem and to form these spore plates, and
in casting time, if you will place them over a piece of paper,
you will find directly the paper is covered with a dark-colored
or gray dust, or different colors in the different species, and
this dust is made up of the spores of the plant. There are
many forms of these thread molds, and they grow under very
different conditions.
The Mixomycetes or slime molds have not been very thor-
oughly studied on account of the difficulty of following
them through all their life processes. They form spores
from hyphea put up much as I have illustrated here (refer-
ring to blackboard). They grow almost exclusively in rot-
ting wood. These spores, falling in favorable places, sprout,
put out a stem, which finally melts down into a slimy mass,
and the product of many spores will run together into a sin-
gle mass of slime that will creep through rotting wood
hither and yon with an amoeboid movement like the amoeba.
At a certain period in its development it will approach the
surface of the .wood, and from it will spring up maybe hun-
dreds of little stems into the air, and upon the tops of these
the spores for the future generation will be formed. \Vc

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