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Updated: June 16, 2025
It lay in sharp sunshine, and the mossy stones were plainly visible, and in the fresh fractures, where the winter's frost had last loosened some mighty blocks, the long stalks of ferns clung with their brown roots in the earth-filled cracks, and on the inch-wide projections a grass-green moss lifted on needle-like stems the little, grey caps, which concealed its spores.
When I had the pleasure of seeing Principal Dawson in London last summer, I showed him my sections of coal, and begged him to re-examine some of the American coals on his return to Canada, with an eye to the presence of spores and sporangia, such as I was able to show him in our English and Scotch coals.
Mars became an agate bead, then a hazy sphere with those swirled, almost fluid markings, where the spores of a perhaps sentient vegetable life followed the paths of thin winds, blowing equatorward from the polar caps of hoarfrost. The three stellene rings bumped lightly on the ten mile chunk of captured asteroidal rock and nickel-iron that was Phobos, Mars' nearer moon. Gravitation was almost nil.
These experiments, you see, all tended towards one conclusion that the infusoria were developed from little minute spores or eggs which were constantly floating in the atmosphere, which lose their power of germination if subjected to heat. But one observer now made another experiment which seemed to go entirely the other way, and puzzled him altogether.
Weight, 180 pounds. Colorless corpuscles very large and varying much in size, as seen at N. Corpuscles filled many of them with the spores of ague vegetation. Also spores swimming in serum. This man has been a gardener back of Hoboken on ague lands, and has had ague for two years preceding this disease.
There are, therefore, two phases to be distinguished in the life of microbes that of active life, during which they multiply with great rapidity, are most active, and cause sicknesses or fermentations, and that of retarded life, that is to say, the state, of resting spores in which the organisms are inactive and consequently harmless.
Wherever the necessary environing conditions obtain, they appear, and wherever these conditions fail, they disappear, notwithstanding the most persistent efforts to save them by watering the soil with fresh infusions of the plant. The process of artificially producing mushroom spores is a very simple one, and may be easily followed.
The reproductive bodies of the great Lepidodendra are sometimes more like seeds than spores, while both the wood and the leaves of the Sigillaria have features which properly belong to the Phanerogam. Further, it is now believed that a large part of what were believed to be Conifers, suddenly entering from the unknown, are not Conifers at all, but Cordaites.
"In time the surface of the rock is crumbled a little by its action; then its own decay furnishes a very little addition to that. In favourable situations a stray oak leaf or two falls and lies there, and also decays, and by and by there is a little coating of soil or a little lodgment of it in a crevice or cavity, enough for the flying spores of some moss to take root and find home."
I flew clean over Cavor's head and beheld a spiky confusion in a gully spreading to meet my fall. I gave a yelp of alarm. I put out my hands and straightened my legs. I hit a huge fungoid bulk that burst all about me, scattering a mass of orange spores in every direction, and covering me with orange powder. I rolled over spluttering, and came to rest convulsed with breathless laughter.
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