The Intellectual Observer - v. 5 Author:Unknown Author Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: A WINDFALL FOR THE MICROSCOPE. BY THE HOST. MBS. WAED. (With a Coloured Plate.) Any one who (whether truly or otherwise) has acquired the namo of a natura... more »list is liable to be asked concerning a jelly-like substance occasionally appearing in sufficient quantity to attract observation. The question sometimes will be, " What is that jelly which falls from the sky ?" as though that method of deposition could alone account for its sudden appearance. In answer, we have generally to say on being shown a specimen, that the jelly alluded to has certainly not fallen from the sky, and can pronounce it to be the plant described by Linnasus as Tremella nostoc, and variously named by other authorities Nostoc, Tremella, " witch-butter," and " shot stars." This Nostoc is of a brownish-green colour, and, with a high magnifying power, proves to be composed of a multitude of very beautiful beaded filaments, lying in gelatinous fronds. These filaments, it would seem, rapidly subdivide, and in this way inerease, while new fronds form around them when favoured by damp. "They frequently," says Dr. Carpenter, "attain a very considerable size, and as they occasionally present themselves quite suddenly (especially in the latter part of the autumn on damp garden walks), they have received the name of 'fallen stars/ They are not always so suddenly produced, however, as they appear to be; for they shrink up into mere films in dry weather, and expand again with the first shower." The inquirers will, perhaps, be content with this explanation ; but possibly the objection may be raised that Nostoc is not the only kind of jolly, and they have seen some of quite different appearance. Possibly, then, a story which I have to tell of some jelly found under circumstances of undoubted isolation, and in a pl...« less