Fünfstück tested the correctness of his views by a prolonged series of growth experiments: he removed the gonidial layer in an endolithic lichen, and found that fat storage continued for some time afterwards, its production being apparently independent of assimilative activity. The correctness of his deductions was further proved by observations on lichens from glacier stones. In such unfavourable conditions the gonidia were scanty or absent, having died off, but the hyphae persisted and formed oil. He[806] also placed in the dark two quick-growing calcicolous lichens, _Verrucaria calciseda_ and _Opegrapha saxicola_. At the end of the experiment, he found that they had increased in size without using up the fat. Lang[807] also is inclined to reject Zukal’s theory, seeing that the fat is formed at a distance from the tissues—reproductive and others—in need of food supply. He agrees with Fünfstück that the oil is an excretion and represents a waste-product of the plant. Considerable light is thrown on the subject of oil-formation by the results of recent researches on the nutrition of algae and fungi. Beijerinck[808] made comparative cultures of diatoms taken from the soil, and he found that so long as culture conditions were favourable, any fat that might be formed was at once assimilated. If, however, some adverse influence checked the growth of the organism while carbonic acid assimilation was in full vigour, fat was at once accumulated. The adverse influence in this case was the lack of nitrogen, and Beijerinck considers it an almost universal rule in plants and animals, that where there is absence of nitrogen, in a culture otherwise suitable, fat-oils will be massed in those cells which are capable of forming oil. He observed that in two of the cultures of diatoms the one which alone was supplied with nitrogen grew normally, while the other, deprived of nitrogen, formed quantities of oil-drops. Wehmer[809] records the same experience in his cultural study of _Aspergillus_. Sphaeroid fat-cells, similar to those described by Zukal in calcicolous lichens, were formed in the hyphae of a culture containing an overplus of calcium carbonate, and he judged, entirely on morphological grounds, that these were not of the nature of reserve-storage cells.