he field. A plasmodium that appeared suddenly and passed
to fruit on agar in a petri dish offers a valuable suggestion for
further research.

With such a life-history as that thus briefly sketched, it is small
wonder that the taxonomic place of the slime-moulds is a matter of
uncertainty, not to say perplexity. So long as men studied the ripened
fruit, the sporangia and the spores, with the marvellous capillitium,
there seemed little difficulty; the myxomycetes were fungi, related to
the puff-balls, and in fact to be classed in the same natural order. The
synonymy of some of the more noticeable species affords a very
interesting epitome of the history of scientific thought in this
particular field of investigation. Thus the first described slime-mould
identifiable by its description is Lycogala epidendrum (Buxbaum) Fries,
the most puff-ball looking of the whole series. Ray, in 1690, called
this _Fungus coccineus_. In 1718, Ruppinus described the same thing as
_Lycoperdon sanguineum_; Dillenius at about the same time, as _Bovista
miniata_; and it was not until 1729, that Micheli so far appreciated the
structure of the little puff-ball as to give it a definite, independent,
generic place and title, _Lycogala globosum_ ..., etc.[8]

But Micheli's light was too strong for his generation. As Fries, one
hundred years later quaintly says, ... "immortalis Micheli tam claram
lucem accendit ut succesores proximi eam ne ferre quidem potuerint."
Notwithstanding Micheli's clear distinctions, he was entirely
disregarded, and our little Lycogala was dubbed _Lycoperdon_ and _Mucor_
down to the end of the century; and so it was not till 1790 that Persoon
comes around to the standpoint of Micheli and writes _Lycogala miniata_.
Fries himself, reviewing the labors of his predecessors all, grouped the
slime-moulds as a sub-order of the gasteromycetes and gave expression to
his view of their nature and position when he named the sub-order
_Myxogastres_. In 1833, Link, having more prominently in mind the
minuteness of most of the species collocated by Fries, and perceiving
perhaps more clearly even than the great mycologist the entire
independence of the group, suggested as a substitute for the sub-order
_Myxogastres_, the order _Myxomycetes, slime-moulds_. Link's decision
passed unchallenged for nearly thirty years. The slime-moulds were set
apart by themselves; they were fungi without question and, of course,
plants.

If the hypha is the