Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/234

 observed these occurrences in 1858 in the case of an unusually simple water-fungus (Pythium). De Bary showed that the intrusive parasite vegetates inside the plant or animal which is its host, and afterwards sends out its organs of propagation into the open air, and that at a given time the organism attacked by the fungus sickens or dies. These investigations were not only of high scientific interest to the biologist, but they produced a series of results of the greatest importance to agriculture and forestry, and even to medicine.

With the Fungi, even more than with the Algae, the chief difficulty in making out a complete series of developments in the history of each species arose from the frequent intercalation of the asexual mode of multiplication into the course of its development, and in the further peculiarity, that the several stages of development in some cases could only be completed on different substrata. One of the most important tasks was to find the sexual organs, the existence of which was rendered probable by various analogies, and after De Bary had observed the sexual organs in the Peronosporeae in 1861, he succeeded in 1863 in proving for the first time that the whole fruit-body of an Ascomycete is itself the product of a sexual act, which takes place on the threads of the mycelium.

The literature of mycology based on De Bary's methods of observation and its actual results has been enriched by others also in various directions since 1860; in the case of the Fungi, as in that of the Algae, it is not possible yet to see to what results investigation will ultimately lead; but it is one of the fairest fruits of strictly inductive method, that it has succeeded in smoothing this thorny and indeed perilous route, where the enquirer is constantly in danger of being misled, and in satisfying the severest demands of science. Conclusions have been already reached that are important for morphology and systematic botany, and among these the establishment of the nature of the large sporophores, and of processes similar to the alternation of generations in the higher Cryptogams should be