If it then be asserted that two or several forms belong to a series of development of one kind, it can only be based on the fact of their organic continuity. The proof is more difficult than in large plants, partly because of the delicacy, minuteness, and fragility of the single parts, particularly the greater part of the mycelia, partly because of the resemblance of the latter in different species, and therefore follows the danger of confusing them with different kinds, and finally, partly in consequence of the presence of different kinds in the same substratum, and therefore the mixture not only of different sorts of mycelia, but also that different kinds of spores are sown. With some care and patience, these difficulties are in no way insurmountable, and they must at any rate be overcome; the organic continuity or non-continuity must be cleared up, unless the question respecting the course of development, and the series of forms of special kinds, be laid on one side as insolvable. Simple and intelligible as these principles are, they have not always been acted upon, but partly neglected, partly expressly rejected, not because they were considered false, but because the difficulties of their application were looked upon as insurmountable. Therefore another method of examination was adopted; the spores of a certain form were sown, and sooner or later they were looked after to see what the seed had produced--not every single spore--but the seed _en masse_, that is, in other words, what had grown on that place where the seed had been sown. As far as it relates to those forms which are so widely spread, and above all grow in conjunction with one another--and that is always the case in the specimens of which we speak--we can never be sure that the spores of the form which we mean to test are not mingled with those of another species. He who has made an attentive and minute examination of this kind knows that we may be sure to find such a mixture, and that such an one was there can be afterwards decidedly proved. From the seed which is sown, these spores, for which the substratum was most suitable, will more easily germinate, and their development will follow the more quickly. The favoured germs will suppress the less favoured, and grow up at their expense. The same relation exists between them as between the seeds, germs, and seedlings of a sown summer plant, and the seeds which have been undesignedly sown with it, only in a still more striking manner, in consequence of the relatively quick development of the mildew fungus.