128 MYCETOZOA OBSERVED IN EPPING FOREST.
The species was first noticed in the winter of 1892, by Christian Lippert,
of Vienna, on a piece of wood which he had brought back two months
before from the Austrian Alps and kept moist. He published an account
of it in 1894, under the name Didymium oculatum.1 I first became
acquainted with this curious species in October 1911, when my friend,
the Rev. W. Cran, sent for my determination some minute sporangia he
had found among moss and lichens on a tree at Skene, near Aberdeen.
His attention was first caught by seeing the pale yellow cushions of plas-
modium as they emerged from the wood. I recognized the species as
being very similar to the description and illustration of Didymium ocula-
tum, and when by the courtesy of Prof. von Hohnel preparations of Lip-
pert's type were lent me, I saw that the Austrian and Scotch specimens
were clearly the same thing. Lippert died about eleven years ago. He
had placed his new species in the genus Didymium on account of the
purple-brown colour of the spores, of the purplish network of capillitium
threads, and because of what he took to be scanty deposits of carbonate
of lime in the sporangium-walls. None of the later gatherings show a
trace of lime in the walls, and it now seems probable that he was mistaken
in this matter ; the species appears to be nearly allied to Lamproderma ;
the presence of the gelatinous coat to the sporangia was, however, so
striking a feature that in publishing an account of Mr. Cran's gathering2
I transferred it to a new genus Colloderma. Since then we find that Collo-
derma oculatum occurs in many parts of the world.
In the first place I recognised that a single puzzling little iridescent
sporangium, sent me in the spring of 1908, from Portugal by the Rev.
Camille Torrend, belonged to this species. Then Prof. Farlow sent me.
a specimen he had gathered on bare wood in the autumn of 1911
in New Hampshire. Last summer Mr. Kumagusu Minakata sent me
two fine developments he had obtained on the mountain of Ando, Kii,
Japan, in December 1910. At the Foray of the British Mycological
Society in the neighbourhood of Forres last September, we found several
specimens on fallen pine boughs. Again last October while Miss Schinz
and I were searching for Mycetozoa in Epping Forest near Debden Green,
she found several of the pale-yellow immature sporangia about five feet
up the mossy trunk of a pollard oak, and later we found a number in the
mature state. Only last week I received specimens of both iridescent
and olive-coloured sporangia gathered on mossy bark in October on the
Jura mountains at an altitude of over 4,000 feet by that ardent and
gifted student of the Mycetozoa, M. Charles Meylan.
From these records we may infer that this interesting species is not
rare, but that its inconspicuous appearance and habit of frequenting the
trunks of living trees has caused it to be overlooked.
1 Im Verhandl. derk. k. zool. bot. Gesell., xliv., p. 72, taf. iv.
2 Journal of Botany, Dec. 1911.