244 Rhodora [DECEMBER 
cept to the squirrels. ‘They know it, and probably are on the watch 
for it, for it is one of their regular autumn foods, which they can use 
while storing away their winter supply of nuts. But for these foragers, 
who scratch away the pine needles and drag the mushrooms to a con- 
venient mound, where they leave the remnants of their feast scattered 
about, or who tuck pieces of the caps in the forks of neighboring 
bushes, or under projecting ends of bark on the trunks of the pines, 
the fungus might often escape notice. Such evidence should provoke 
a search, which will always be rewarded, though the searcher may have 
to drop upon all fours and scratch like the squirrels before he finds 
what he is after. 
Though what has been said ought almost to be enough to make this 
autumn Tricholoma recognizable, for in the writer's experience, there 
is no other toadstool, about Boston at least, to which the same remarks 
would apply, some further note of its characteristics had best be given. 
As is true of the genus, it has no ring, and its lamellz, slightly attached 
to the stem, show the regulation notch or sinus with which anyone who 
would know Tricholoma must become familiar. The lamella are broad, 
white, often with a tinge of yellow at the outer end; the stem is 
firm, white, or nearly so, sometimes hollow, especially in mature speci- 
mens, but frequently nearly solid, or showing merely a looseness of 
structure in the interior; the cap is smooth and slightly uneven and ir- 
regular, often a little shiny, and beautifully streaked with long innate 
fibrils that extend outward from the centre and deepen the grayish or 
brownish violaceous tint of the sürface. In the older specimens the 
thin pellicle bearing these fibrils often becomes a little broken up and 
ragged, and can easily be stripped clean from the white flesh. The 
fungus has no odor, or scarcely any, though its taste when raw is 
slightly farinaceous. It is remarkably free from the attacks o£ insect 
larvze, owing in part, no doubt, to the late season of its fruiting. Its 
size is from two to four inches broad ; the stem is at least half an inch 
thick, and sometimes double that, and two to five inches long. 
Like so many of our agarics, Zyicholoma portentosum is a species 
of the Old World as well as of the New, having been studied and de- 
scribed by Fries in the early part of this century. As given by the 
Swedish mycologist, the European habitat of the species is the same as 
that described for it in New England, where it is, to use Fries's state- 
ment, “a common species in pine woods, growing in late autumn in 
company with Zricholoma equestre." The latter is a brownish yellow 
