4. Form d, F. flava Pers.
This is hardly F. flava of Persoon; rather of Morgan who uses Persoon's specific designation. Persoon cites Bolton's fig. CXXXIV, which is yellow indeed but is the ordinary presentation of F. septica. The form here considered is remarkable for its delicacy; extremely thin, perhaps one layer only of overlying elongate flexuous sporangia(?), covered by the merest shadow of a cortex in the form of yellow dust, soon lost: the capillitial structure yellow throughout; occurring upon fallen logs in moist dark woods; not common.
5. Form e, F. violacea Pers.
Plasmodium (Morgan teste) dark red, or wine-colored; the æthalium thin, two or three inches wide, covered by a cortex at first dull red and very soft, at length almost wholly vanishing, so that the entire mass takes on a purple-violet tint, upper surface varied with white; capillitium rather open, the more or less inflated, large, irregular nodes joined by long, slender, delicate, transparent filaments; spores dark violet, minutely roughened, spherical, about 7.5 µ.
Ohio, Tennessee. Probably everywhere, but not distinguished from 1.
Professor Morgan, who gave the genus under consideration much attention, regarded F. violacea as a form particularly well-defined. What the value of plasmodic color as a specific character in general, and how far such character is in the present case definitive, because constant, are points yet to be determined.
4. Fuligo intermedia Macbr. n. s.
Æthalium two to three cm. in greatest diameter, .5–1 cm. thick, covered with a thin, fragile, but not calcareous, greyish or brownish cortex; the spore-mass grey or violaceous-grey, firm, not at all sooty, the sporangia intricate, their walls more or less calcareous; capillitium not conspicuous; spores globose, pale purple, slightly roughened, 10–12 µ.
This form has been repeatedly sent me from Denver, Colorado, by Professor Bethel. I have refrained from publishing it, still anxious to believe that all fuligos on the face of the earth were of one species. In the species next following it must be admitted that the spore-variations are too wide to remain comfortably under shelter of a single specific name. The present species is not F. septica, neither is it F. megaspora; it is F. intermedia.
Colorado; Iowa.