THEIR STUDY IN BRITAIN. 9
he was 36, and had settled in Leytonstone, that he took up
the study of botany. In the succeeding years, whenever holidays
brought leisure from business occupations, he devoted himself
with enthusiasm to the examination and collection first of
flowering plants and later of mosses and lichens. The micro-
scopic structure of these minute plants he drew, with the aid
of the '' camera lucida," with faithful accuracy. Each fresh
subject attacked seemed to open a new window through which
the glory of nature was revealed. When, in 1870, Dr. Cooke's
Handbook of British Fungi appeared, my father plunged into
the study of fungi with boy-like ardour ; coloured drawings
were made of the more puzzling species ; and a long row of
beautifully-illustrated notebooks bears witness to the grasp
of the subject that he acquired. Along with fungi, Mycetozoa
were collected ; and these latter, from their great beauty and
variety and from their remarkable life-history, soon became
special favourites. Epping Forest and later Wanstead Park,
when it was thrown open to the public, proved grand hunting-
grounds in which a harvest of specimens could be found in most
seasons. My father's attention was early attracted by the
orange plasmodium of Badhamia utricularis, which is often
a conspicuous object on prostrate logs, as it feeds on growths
of leathery fungi. He found that it could be easily cultivated
at home if the right provender was supplied. A series of experi-
ments was made in which a variety of food, such as starch,
boiled or raw, cotton wool, wholesome or poisonous fungi, was
given the plasmodium to eat, as it crept in home-made glass
boxes where its behaviour could be watched under the microscope.
The study of this creature, a simple mass of naked protoplasm
possessing a mysterious rhythmic circulation, endowed with
an extremely sensitive, yet adaptable, nature, and though
apparently a simple organism, yet capable of building up complex
fructifications, was a source of endless interest and wonder
to him. The results of his experiments on plasmodia, and
of his observations on the absorption and digestion of bacteria
by the swarm-spores of Mycetozoa, were published in the Journal
of the Linnean Society and in the Annals of Botany.
The appearance in 1877 of Cooke's British Myxomycetes,
by which the work of Rostafinski was introduced to English
readers, gave a stimulus to the systematic side of his studies.